New Search Strategy for Firefox | Hacker News Reader

New Search Strategy for Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

430 pointsOsmose344 comments

This is why Google built Chrome. Google's strategy has been to remove the layers between the user's intent to search and Google's own server. Every intermediate layer that Google does not control is a risk to their business.

When viewed through these lens, many of the seemingly ancillary Google business units start to make strategic sense. Android (control the device), Chrome (control the browser), Fiber (control the tubes).

Each of these channels is an opportunity for disruption by some competitor search engine and Google wants to make sure they don't get blindsided. Or one of the gateways could demand a massive tribute for Google to pass through (cable companies are pushing for this via the war against net neutrality).

If Google didn't have Chrome and Firefox was the leading browser, they'd be in big trouble with this news. Lucky for them they thought about this a long time ago and built a browser which now accounts for 50% of market share.

Yahoo NEEDS this deal. For Google, it's a nice to have.

You forgot Google Glass (control the eyes).

From all indications Google Glass is being shifted towards being an enterprise product e.g. helping people pack shelves.

So in this case it doesn't really apply.

As an enterprise dev mgr who has been thinking about prototyping an app to do exactly this (well, actually the opposite -- to guide warehouse staff in the kitting process for manufacturing), I'm curious: where have you seen indications of Glass evolving toward the enterprise? I haven't seen it anywhere, but Google has tons of AR competition in the industrial space already, many of which are FAR more capable than Glass, which is 1) fragile, 2) feature-limited, 3) low res crappy display, 4) not at all intended to work autonomously.

Yes maybe through polarized lenses that filter out all their failed products.

If google didn't have chrome they would have just paid FF whatever was necessary to remain the main search partner.

It's also possible they'd be looking at a stronger and for them untouchable IE->Bing marketshare instead.

> Every intermediate layer that Google does not control is a risk to their business.

Every intermediate layer that Google does control is also an opportunity for lock-in. Which is seriously starting to piss me off, as they are increasingly turning their back on open standards.

I remember I started moving out of Google's claws when they started pushing Google+ everywhere. Today my primary browser is Firefox, Search engine is DDG (with occassional Google search), Email is FastMail. The dependency on Google had started to annoy me.

Same here. I used to have Google Mail, Google Contacts, YouTube, Google Search, Google News, etc.

I was feeling more and more dependent on one company's goodwill. A few months ago, I renewed my Fastmail [1] account for 3 more years, being very happy with the service. I use DuckDuckGo [2] as my main search engine and love it. I use Opera as my main browser. The only Google services I use regularly now are Android and YouTube. YouTube being totally optional and Android only being an interface to data located elsewhere, I feel free. Sure, Google has access to my data, but they can't lock me in.

[1] https://www.fastmail.com [2] https://duckduckgo.com

How is Android without using Google services? Is there a significant impact on the experience?

A while back I flashed my Nexus 5 with a CyanogenMod 11 build. I didn't install the GApps package afterward.

One thing you will notice immediately is that the battery life lasts much much longer. With casual surfing, watching video clips, playing casual games and Wifi always on, the battery lasts for almost 24 hours. It looks as if this is what the original Nexus 5 should be. All those background Google services and "frameworks" constantly calling back home will drain the battery to the death pretty fast. That's also valid for some other apps. Not having Facebook app installed will increase the battery life too.

Sure you have no Google Play store installed but you can always use one of those (safe) apk downloaders like Raccoon[1] or such to login to Play store and download your previous apps. As for other Google services (Maps, YouTube, Translate, GMail, etc.), I can always visit their sites in incognito mode. You will actually realize you really don't need all those individual apps to use these services. They all work good enough in a browser window.

[1]http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2772436

And you can still use 3rd party markets like F-Droid and Aptoide.

Excellent point, completely forgot the invaluable F-Droid.

Also, another option is BlankStore [1]. it appears as if development has stopped and Raccoon may be a better option at this point, but it still works for me on 4.4.4 and gives me pretty consistent access straight from my phone, save for paid apps.

[1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1715375

The only Google services I use on my Android phone are Maps and the Play store. Occasionally Drive and Docs because of a customer that uses them. I search in the browser. No sync. It works perfectly fine. But that's how I use Google on my desktop too. If you are used to more integration you won't survive that :-)

The experience for me is the same because all products I use regularly have good mobile apps and/or mobile webapps.

The biggest thing i'm looking for now is a replacement for Google's apps suite - mainly Calendar and Docs/Drive. Something that i can use on the web and sync to my (Android) phone. If the Docs replacement just did text documents, that would probably be enough; if it did spreadsheets and text, it would definitely be enough. It would be great if it was free, and fine if it was cheap. Not Apple (no better than Google), not Evernote (poor and declining quality). What's out there?

Fastmail has a good Calendar app in addition to Email, Contacts and File Storage. It doesn't really have a Docs replacement, but it does have a Notes app. I use all of them and enjoy it quite a bit.

It also is probably worth noting that, while Apple is plenty evil in its own ways, if you're looking to avoid the rampant data collection of Google, Apple is significantly better in that regard.

i sync fastmail's calendar with the built-in android calendar app by using caldav.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda...

This is a tough one. I have seen Etherpad [http://etherpad.org/] being used a lot. The there is Zoho suite of apps [https://www.zoho.com/] but I am not sure if they really match your requirements completely.

For writing and other docs, I personally use Dropbox but I know that is not the same as working in the browser itself.

There's also Ethercalc [https://ethercalc.org/], a spreadsheet version of Etherpad.

Etherpad, Ethercalc and Mailpile (and more!) are all available on top of Sandstorm [https://sandstorm.io/apps/] - which basically makes it easier to manage them all.

Owncloud has something similar but it's very new. Also, it means you run it on your own hardware, and it's open source. https://owncloud.org/blog/owncloud-7-sneak-peek-online-colla...

I have slowly moved to Microsoft Office Online. It has worked fine so far. I had become a heavy GDocs user and became accustomed to the simplified feature set. I think Office Online is decent free alternative.https://office.com/start/default.aspx

I agree that the hard part (even more so for a business looking to change) is the docs suite.

It still surprises me a little that there is no web-app capable of editing ODF files. This would allow the email/calendar etc concept to be carried over - host the content (in this case files) on a server in version control, and allow users to either keep an offline copy that syncs, or access via a web app.

From a personal usage view, I disagree with your statement that Apple is no better than Google. No, their software is not open source and doesn't run on any device you want. But their software is also not intended to capture all your personal information and use that to show you more ads. It's basically a perk for using their hardware.

Quip is pretty good as a Google Docs replacement. It's got apps for web and mobile-- https://quip.com

Like others, I use Fastmail's calendar now. I also run my own Baikal[1] server for CardDAV/contacts (though I guess I could run my calendar on it too, since it does CalDAV).

[1] http://baikal-server.com/

I use Fastmail's calendar which they made public a few months ago. I'm finding it just as fast as Google's calendar. For docs I started using Quip which is not as full featured but it offers just enough to make things quick and easy.

Thanks for the Fastmail recommendation! I have been using Yahoo for 8 years now, but I've never really felt comfortable using a free service for something as critical as email. And certainly not comfortable leaving it in the hands of one of the biggest companies in the world.

FastMail seems very transparent. They provide aost of the stuff that I needed from an Email hosting company, even independent audits.

> The dependency on Google had started to annoy me.

Either Chrome or Firefox or something else. Choose your poison. One's life has to be depended on something.

Check out yacy, a distributed search engine :)

Same here. FF + DDG + FastMail is a quite low action path away from Google for individual users. Migration took me only a day (FastMail's mass migration is truly a breeze) and after almost a year: no complaints (maybe minor wishes, but hey!).

EDIT: and K-9 (for Android) as mail-client.

As a Googler who cares very much about open standards, I don't think that assessment is fair or accurate.

As a Mozillian who also cares very much about open standards, I agree. Google has both a long and recent track record of helping to advance open standards - CalDAV, WebRTC, WebM, etc. - and I have no doubt they will continue to do so - e.g., Physical Web.

However, Google's purpose in the world is not to advance open standards.

That is Mozilla's purpose. That's why this is a strategic, long-term decision on Mozilla's part. A world with a strong Google, strong Mozilla, and strong Yahoo (and Apple, and Microsoft, and Samsung, and Intel, etc.) is better for everyone.

A world where any one of those entities controls too much power is worse.

For me, I look forward to working with partners at Google and Yahoo.

Advance open standards?

* Like how they were planning to require whitelisting for CalDAV access? * Like how they completely bastardise the IMAP protocol? * Like how they disabled XMPP federation and then dropped XMPP support completely, for their GTalk replacement?

This is a perfect example of how (some) open-standards advocates have impossible expectations.

Your complaints about IMAP and XMPP are completely opposite. When Hangouts stopped supporting XMPP (designed in 1998) due to product evolution, you complain that they dropped XMPP support. But when Gmail continued to support IMAP (designed in 1986) despite the product diverging somewhat from traditional email, you complain they are "bastardizing the IMAP protocol."

What course of action by Google would make you happy? The Internet can't stay in the year 2000. Major players move it forward -- Mozilla, Google, and others. I think Google has a pretty good track record of doing this as openly as they can.

Google's stated reason for abandoning XMPP is nothing to do with product evolution. They publicly stated that the reason for dropping support, was a lack of "industry adoption".

Personally I trust that about as much as I would trust a priest to give me a colonoscopy - open access means less control for Google, which means less ability to collect data and/or display ads.

Keeping XMPP support (and federation) would have allowed interoperability with a range of XMPP clients on desktop/mobile devices, AND with users of other XMPP services - whether they be services provided by third parties, or "private" services run by organisations/individuals. It would also have also been useful as leverage to encourage other "big" IM networks to open up their "private" XMPP based IM networks - Facebook Chat, WhatsApp, Cisco WebEx, etc. They're all using XMPP, but they're islands right now. At this point Google are worse than those islands, because not only are they not embracing open XMPP & federation, they're not even supporting XMPP any more - so if FB/WhatsApp said "hey we want to support XMPP federation from tomorrow" Google users have no possible way to be involved in that any more.

Google's implementation of IMAP is fundamentally broken. The big ticket item, "tags" is ridiculous, as IMAP already has a defined standard for "tags": the IMAP keywords feature.

The usual Google fanboy response to this is "but IMAP clients don't support keywords fully", which of course ignores the fact that standard IMAP clients also don't support the idea of messages appearing in multiple mailboxes (i.e. folders) either, but the network effect of Gmail has meant MANY clients have come to support Gmail specific features.

Imagine for a second, if instead of its current shit soup solution, Google had implemented the existing IMAP standard for keywords. It's not unreasonable to expect that the majority of IMAP clients would have been quick(er) to implement support for this part of the spec, which would mean users of other IMAP services (either hosted services or self-hosted mail servers) would also be able to use IMAP keywords.

It's been said before and I'll say it again: Google is following the same plays that Microsoft made over a decade ago. Latch onto an open standard, use your market position to make "additions" to said standard, and finally pull support for said standard, in favour of your own closed solution.

I'll wait for the regular Google fanboy down votes.

I downvoted you, and I feel obligated to explain my reason. Others will vote how they will.

I'm no Google fanboy. But please reply to the argument instead of calling names. Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

Instead of calling gmail "shit soup," just talk about the existing IMAP standard for keywords.

I didn't complain about being down voted nor did I "invite others to down vote", I referenced a well-known phenomenon where opinions (and even statements of fact) that criticise Google are often down voted on HackerNews, simply because they are critical of Google.

The whole concept of "don't complain about being down voted" is itself quite ridiculous. Given how hacker news works (i.e. down voted comments are hidden) this effectively encourages people to simply "go with the crowd". I disagree with this entire concept. Differences of opinion, and yes even criticism, are what drive people to make things BETTER.

> But please reply to the argument

What, like identifying why I believe Google's actions are "bad", what I think they could/should have done that would be "good", and how those alternative actions would have been had a more positive outcome?

"I'll wait for the regular Google fanboy down votes" is baiting other users into downvoting you, and that is against the HN guidelines. Please stay on topic.

Also, phrases like "about as much as I would trust a priest to give me a colonoscopy" and "the usual Google fanboy response" are inflammatory and inappropriate for substantive discussion, which is what HN calls for. Please edit such flamebait out of your comments. It's understandable that it sneaks in there—we're all susceptible to it—but that's what the edit button is for. Not only will excising it not hurt your argument, it will help it considerably, and display good manners to your fellow users to boot.

If people down vote simply because I mentioned the concept of people down voting an opinion or fact simply because they disagree with it, then my point about the stupidity of the "don't mention being down voted" concept is proven true.

If people down-vote you, your words will have the connotation that they do it because that they are Google fanboys, rather than have a reasonable argument against your opinion. That is why such wording is not conductive to discussion.

The idea of down voting comments you disagree with is ridiculous anyway.

If you have a counter argument, reply.

Down voting a comment (which leads to it effectively disappearing) is the electronic equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "la la la I'm not listening" because you don't like what someone else said.

If someone posts a comment saying "I like chocolate ice cream" in a discussion about a new version of a piece of software, down vote to your hearts content.

When someone posts a comment that simply disagrees with your opinion, either ignore it or reply with a counter point.

This is not only off-topic, it's the black hole of off-topicness. Please stop.

Fair enough. Then I rephrase. Your words carry the connotation that any one who down-votes you is a Google fanboy, rather than have any valid reason permitted by the HN guidelines (whatever that may be). That is why such wording is not conductive to discussion.

And for the record, I don't have any opinion about this XMPP /Google thing. I don't even know what XMPP is, so I am perfectly neutral here.

FYI, Google is not perfect and I am glad Vic Gundotra was fired, but I think things like the Scroogled campaign is probably just FUD.

Other than locking in users, Hangouts offers no feature that XMPP does not. Additionally, XMPP is extensible, so if they intend do add new features, they could just have extended XMPP.

How old a particular standard is doesn't really have that much bearing on whether or not it's a good standard (if it were, then it shouldn't be long before we all switch away from HTTP and SSH for the sake of "innovation"). Nor is age an excuse for introducing a replacement that's locked down to a specific vendor.

I'm fine with Google dropping their support for open standards - their services, their rules, and if they don't care about users like me who prefer the open standards, then it's not my place to whine about it when I can instead seek a competitor that does adhere to those standards. However, I'm not fine with such dropping of standards being masqueraded under some lame excuse like "the open standards are too old". 1998 and 1986 are young compared to the majority of the standards which form the backbone of the Internet and World Wide Web themselves. If you're going to try and rationalize Google's actions beyond them wanting to make money via control over their stack, then at least try and find some actual technical reason why XMPP and IMAP are insufficient for their purposes.

(I'll concede that IMAP isn't exactly pretty, but it sounds like XMPP at least could have simply been extended if there were features Google needed for Hangouts).

> if it were, then it shouldn't be long before we all switch away from HTTP and SSH for the sake of "innovation"

Not great examples. HTTP has evolved several times to address changing needs: HTTP 0.9 (1991), HTTP 1.0 (1996), HTTP 1.1 (1997), HTTP 1.1 again (2007) and HTTP 2.0 (targeted for 2014). So did SSH: SSH-1 (1995) SSH-2 (2006).

These evolutions were possible because there were multiple major players that could come together (with multiple implementations) to settle on the new standard.

> but it sounds like XMPP at least could have simply been extended if there were features Google needed for Hangouts

In an alternate future where Google did that, people would have cried "embrace, extend, extinguish." Especially if any of their extensions were anti-spam related, people would have criticized them for being exclusionary.

For example, look at all the flak Google has gotten for SPDY. Evolving XMPP would have probably led to the same criticism.

And XMPP still wouldn't have provided interop with any of the major IM networks, because none of them were implementing it.

You truly can't please everybody, even if you really believe in something.

Just like HTTP, XMPP has evolved, with earlier RFC's being superseded by more recent ones.

Extensibility is a built in part of the XMPP standard, and Google have already made several extensions related to Google Talk etc.

Using XMPP provides a much greater possibility of interoperability, as several other major "modern" IM networks use their own non-federated XMPP network. WhatsApp, Facebook Chat, etc. It's much more likely that two non-federated XMPP networks will become federated, than two binary incompatible networks both becoming binary compatible AND supporting federation.

> and I have no doubt they will continue to do so

Regrettably, you're quite mistaken in doing so. They're dropping CalDAV. Their IMAP implementation has been broken for close to a decade. But the very worst is their dropping XMPP is favour of Hangouts. This truly reflected Google's final intentions.

What about the move from Talk to Hangouts? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-s...

Google added support for XMPP fedederation in 2006, hoping that other messaging services would follow suit: http://www.zdnet.com/google-embraces-open-im-standards-30392...

Seven years later, not a single other major IM service had added the same support. All XMPP federation support had accomplished was providing a spam vector to Google Talk users.

Google's public statement when they dropped federation in 2013 was: "XMPP was designed over a decade ago to provide a way for chat networks to interoperate, known as federation. Google Talk was the only major network to support federation, and after seven years, it’s evident that the rest of the industry is not moving to embrace this open system. If, at some point in the future, the industry shows interest, then we would then be open to discussions about developing an interface that's designed for modern needs." http://www.zdnet.com/google-moves-away-from-the-xmpp-open-me...

Calling this an anti-openness move seems a little backwards when Google was the only company supporting federation to begin with!

Thousands of XMPP servers serving millions of people had S2S properly enabled and working among them. Or one has to be a single entity as large as MSN or AIM to be considered worthy to enjoy openness?

> Thousands of XMPP servers serving millions of people had S2S properly enabled and working among them.

I'm surprised to hear a number that high, but regardless of what the number actually is, it certainly sucked for those people.

But remember the context: Google was looking to expand Talk into Hangouts, and XMPP would have needed a makeover to support that product evolution. If Google had extended XMPP unilaterally, they would have been accused of "embrace, extend, extinguish." Without other major players to co-design with, it didn't make a lot of sense to try pursuing a next-generation standard.

> Or one has to be a single entity as large as MSN or AIM to be considered worthy to enjoy openness?

That's kind of inflammatory.

Remember when Mozilla removed MNG support from Firefox despite having 700 votes on the bug? Remember when the Mozilla CEO responded to a status update on the bug by saying "stop adding new noxious gas to this bloated corpse of a bug"? Are those 700 people not "considered worthy to enjoy openness" either? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574

Organizations have to make trade-offs sometimes, and you can't please everybody all the time.

I get it the numbers are irrelevant, but just wanted to share where those came from.

http://www.process-one.net/en/imtrends/article/usage_estimat... - "that study relies on a panel of 7292 XMPP domains as discovered by the IMtrends engine"

So, I'd guess, if there's was least 7k public servers in 2008, it won't be wrong to say "thousands."

http://xmpp.org/xsf/press/2003-09-22.shtml - this one is old, much before the popularity peak, when XMPP was still called Jabber, and yet: "the JSF's estimate includes more than 4 million paying customers of Jabber, Inc.'s commercial software as well as an estimated 6 million users of open source and other commercial implementations of the Jabber/XMPP protocol"

So, I guess, "millions" isn't a wrong estimate, too.

I don't think that removing XMPP was evil/inappropriate, but I don't think MNG is really comparable, since Mozilla (really, Vlad Vukićević) went to a lot of effort to design, implement, and submit APNG for standardization as a simpler replacement. (Sadly, the PNG group didn't bite, and neither did anyone else, but there was a good faith effort.)

Too often, people confuse the idea of open standards with "things that have to be implemented". If an open standard doesn't serve any significant portion of a user base (e.g., most Google Talk or Hangouts users) and is very commonly abused (by spammers or otherwise), it's not worth having in a product. It's simply not sensible to make a business decision to support something (open standard or otherwise) if the negative aspects far outweigh the positive ones.

Where's the outrage that Twitter stopped letting users post via SMS and XMPP? Should we shame Firefox for exporting my bookmarks as HTML and not as OPML? Should I be mad at Facebook for not allowing me to export my Like information in APML format and instead providing it in Facebook Archive format? Of course not, that's silly. RDF is an open standard, but that doesn't mean websites should bring Dublin Core back.

I think open standards are things to be implemented if you want to interoperate with others. Google used to do that but doesn't want interop anymore. That hurted communities that used those open standards. I guess, that's a pretty valid reason to complain.

It all boils down to millennia-old issue that if business interests aren't aligned with minorities' demands, those are being ignored. Don't think this can be solved in reality.

> Where's the outrage that Twitter stopped letting users post via SMS and XMPP?

Lost in time. Personally, I had complained. I heard the other rant, too. I had registered for an API token and set up personal XMPP-to-Twitter gateway. And then I got bored with all this stuff and just trashed it and gave up.

But, hey, is it really silly that I had complained and cursed them evil?

Well, maybe it was...

Agreed. Sometimes I think the people who don't appreciate Google's "openness" are not old enough to remember either the early closed internet platforms (Prodigy/CompuServe/AOL) or the Microsoft products that are only recently getting around to open standards.

Luckily, those people who didn't experience/don't remember the Microsoft experience the first time around, will get to experience it all over again now with Google.

So.. can I migrate to another search engine by taking all of my personal data that Google has collected on me? Well, you should know that you work for a marketing company that inserts itself between content other people create, and users that want to access it and then exacts a toll in the form of personal data. The entirety of Google's revenue is about lock-in and proprietary code and APIs. The advertising-enabled anti-privacy web that Google has enabled is frankly quite unappealing.

I've refused to get into any Google product beyond GMail, YouTube, and search. I'm trying to ween myself off Google search and I block YouTube cookies (though I doubt that throws Googles behavioural monitoring off).

Yahoo's main business is not search, so I don't know how bad it needs it. Of course more money is always good, and Yahoo is not a super growing company,

Alaso, this is the same strategy that turned Google from "best buddy" to "arch rival" in the eyes of Apple and pushed Apple to have its own mapping service and offer other search options.

This is also the level of control that motivates people to try Duckduckgo, or switch to firefox.

In the end I think Google has a net win, but the reaction of the partner companies seems to be more negative than neutral.

Indeed - Yahoo is also powering Weather and Stocks apps on iOS. All the competition is good for everyone.

Not since iOS8/Yosemite - Apple now gets weather data directly from The Weather Channel, who also supply Yahoo with their data.

In that situation Yahoo were just a middle man, and supposedly didn't make the full set of TWC data/functionality available.

Yahoo's main business is its investments in Asian companies. It's a hedge fund with a side business in tech. It's not crazy for them to try to break out of that.

I would say its a tech company that found itself afloat due to some lucky/wise investments.

At the core it is still a tech / content company, even though the tech is not producing the money.

I’m not sure why they haven’t made DDG the default yet.

Realistically it's because DDG can't pay the bills

DuckDuckGo’s or Mozilla’s?

Mozilla's.

Google paid Mozilla around $275 million in search royalties in 2012, the latest year Mozilla has released financials.

Source: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...

90% of $305 million in royalties (see page 4 and Note 8)

> This is why Google built Chrome.

Seriously? Do you remember what browsers were like before Chrome?

Maybe your memory is failing you, but FF and Safari were still great browsers when Chrome first came out. Chrome took over slowly because of constant improvement, it wasn't much different except for some technical details and clean UI.

For simple pages Chrome was faster. But the tradeoff was that you didn't get things like MathML- which was important to- maybe- three of us. And iirc, SVG was better on FF (I did physics tutorial and animation stuff- I told people to use FF).

Also, I still prefer video on FF. Chrome is choppier with a lousy connection or hardware. But Chrome is quicker to load a simple site which makes it overall a better experience for passive web browsing. (But to be fair my FF is loaded with add-ons so that may slow it down a bit).

You should restart FF with addons disabled (Help > Restart with Add-ons Disabled) and then compare the two. If you want a "passive web browsing experience" on FF, you could create a separate profile.

Or you know, use Chrome. That way, I don't have to consider what type of "web browsing experience" I need to have today.

That's what I do. I use chrome for a lot of stuff, but if I'm browsing video or or doing web development stuff I use FF.

And people here have told me that I'd like the Chrome dev tools better, but although I tried I was too lazy to completely switch so I just use FF and Firebug.

I have installed lots of extensions on FF because I find them to be useful. If I were to use Chrome as my primary browser and wanted the same features that my current FF setup gives me, then I would have to install extensions. But the extensions would slow Chrome down and then I would be back to square one. So "just use Chrome" is not a solution.

Maybe not for everyone. I find myself alone amongst many because I hate tools. The need for a tool means there is some problem that has to be solved. For instance, I much prefer languages that don't necessitate an IDE. I'd much rather program in Ruby, Python, Javascript, or anything else I can do competently in vi, with a 5 line .vimrc file. Even when in vi I only use like 5 commands. I find other ways to be effective. I can boot up Eclipse or IntelliJ or whatever and get the job done, but certainly there has to be a better way?

I installed Chrome because its fast. I liked it for web development because it had "Firebug" essentially built in. I eventually peeked back at Firefox to see if was doing anything interesting on the development side, but by that point much preferred the overall speed and simplicity of Chrome that I simply haven't bothered to go back.

Compared to IE, developing for both platforms rarely requires you to even check Firefox for correctness or performance once you get around the quirks or use more recently developed JS libraries.

I think the only extension I installed for Chrome was TamperMonkey. And a couple of things developed for work purposes.

I was one of the users who thought MathML was important. Until I don't. MathML itself is a terrible idea as no one can write a formula like that. Most mathematicians and physicists are already familiar with LaTeX, but the standards body have to invent an much more verbose language that only machines can read.

I'm happy with MathJax.

MathML was important, because the only alternative was webEQ or other things that turned the equations into pictures.

I would write equations in the openoffice equation editor and run an awk script on them. Tedious, but I'm not repulsed by such things.

Firefox was great, but the performance was sub-par around version 3, and the time between releases was measured in years, not weeks. Chrome definitely gave Mozilla a nice kick in the backside, which I am very thankful for. These days Firefox is now close to, if not faster and less memory hungry than Chrome.

  > Firefox was great, but the performance was sub-par around version 3

Before Chrome, Firefox's performance was sub-par compared to... what? Definitely not to Safari, Chrome, or IE.

The main knock on Firefox at that time was that it was too memory-hungry. That was always somewhat of an inaccurate rap. Not totally undeserved, but not totally deserved either.

  > Chrome definitely gave Mozilla a nice kick in the backside, which I am very thankful for. These days Firefox is now close to, if not faster and less memory hungry than Chrome.

Heck yes to all of that.

> Heck yes to all of that.

The performance improvements have been great, but I have to admit the UI changes are highly concerning to me. Fortunately the FF extension APIs are the best around, so now I just can't use Firefox without "Classic Theme Restorer".

I personally never minded Australis, since I've been used to it via Thunderbird (which rolled it out first). That said, it really doesn't affect me that much since I use Tree View Tabs anyway (and I don't use the menu enough to really care beyond having nice big buttons to click on when my morning coffee hasn't kicked in yet).

There's nothing wrong with my memory. In fact, I remember (as an OS X user) running a Windows VM specifically so that I could use Chrome; it performed so much better that it was actually worth the emulation overhead to run it in a VM.

FF and Safari were okay, but at the time Chrome was a revelation.

I'm a Firefox user and contributor, but I'm happy to agree that Chrome advanced (and continues to advance) the state of the art in all sorts of ways.

But that still doesn't explain why Google thinks that building a web browser is an important business for Google to be in, especially at an annual cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. To answer that question, you do need to look at how it intersects with Google's other businesses and revenue streams.

…and with a bigger marketing budget than pretty much any other browser (even if you discount all the marketing on Google IP that isn't for sale to start with). If it were just about pushing the browser market forward, it long ago reached a point of having enough marketshare to do that. If they were to target specific countries where, e.g., IE6 remains a major browser, that'd be pushing the market forward. But they aren't.

The browser is the operating environment one develops GUI applications for now. (A situation akin to developing apps for windows 3 running on DOS). I think any company would like to own the delivery platform, I'm sure Google loves Chrome.

As to why Google and why Chrome, it makes a ton of sense, c. 2004, 2005, when Google was butting heads with Microsoft that they would formulate plans to undermine Microsoft's platform dominance. The OS being the vulnerable foundation of the MS pyramid.

It still impresses me how much Microsoft got snookered software delivery-wise in so many arenas by Google.

Safari and Firefox were (and are) pretty darn good. Given that Chrome used Safari's rendering engine, I wouldn't expect otherwise.

Yes, I used Opera back then.

Only Chrome finally made a faster/better/stronger browser.

The state of the browser market provided Google the opportunity to be successful with controlling more of the distribution channel. Its clear corporate strategy that when you depend on a small number of others to deliver your product (search), you are in a weaker strategic position. Google offering a high quality browser helps reduce risk. The same goes for Android with mobile search, maps, etc.

It can be both. The opportunity was there because browsers weren't good. The incentive to make Chrome was that it improved both Google's defensive position (Microsoft couldn't make Bing #1 through force) & offensive position. (Google can tie search & Chrome together)

You're giving Google way too much credit for forward thinking. Your rhetoric reeks of conspiracy theories. For one thing, Eric Schmidt was actually against building a browser.

> Every intermediate layer that Google does not control is a risk to their business.

Every intermediate layer that Google does not control is less access to information that they can use to build an advertising profile on you. Hence their strategy of attempting to control the network edges to gain as much visibility as possible (see Chrome, Android, Google Fiber etc).

You forgot Gmail/Picasa/Google Plus/Google Drive/Google Cloud/Youtube type services (control the server), Google Glass (control the user's visual conception).

So, Google is pursuing vertical integration.

> If Google didn't have Chrome and Firefox was the leading browser, they'd be in big trouble with this news.

One could argue Mozilla wouldn't necessarily consider switching if Google wasn't in the browser market at all, though. Much like Apple wouldn't have dropped Google Maps from iOS if it wasn't for Android.

Some more details:

* This is a new, more flexible partnership strategy.

* Continuing the existing relationship with Google was an option, but Mozilla chose to end the Google relationship.

* All the options Mozilla considered had strong, improved economic terms (but the concrete numbers are not public). Because all the options had improved economics, that allowed Mozilla to really consider the strategic outlook.

* The Yahoo agreement in the US is for five years.

* Yahoo will be rolling out a new, improved search tool soon.

* Mozilla has agreements with Yandex and Baidu for Russia and China.

* Google will remain an included option in Firefox and Mozilla will continue to support its use.

Some details of the new Yahoo experience are available on their corporate Tumblr: http://yahoo.tumblr.com/1313

Note: nnethercote is a Mozilla employee (as am I). These details are straight from the horse's mouth (dino's mouth?).

As long as the horse is in the house, has Mozilla ever given any thought to creating its own search service?

I don't know of any actual projects to that end, but certainly people have thought about it. I know from personal conversations that Asa Dotzler in particular has given it some very detailed thought, though I don't know if or where he's written up any of those ideas...

I believe I have seen the notion pop up once or twice on planet.mozilla and it has been why its not a mozilla project.

Would there be a point in doing that instead of aligning with, say, DuckDuckGo? They share a primary ideology (an open web that works for everyone), and I imagine much of the Firefox userbase and developerbase (perhaps not a majority, but I'd imagine a significant minority) already uses DDG as their primary search engine.

Nice. Sometimes watching the search business is like watching "Game of Thrones".

How does promoting Yandex and Baidu in regions where they are already dominant (Russia and China, respectively) align with Mozilla's new mission? I'm not sure how entrenching their hold on their home markets promotes user choice, innovation, or privacy.

At least it provides diversity of income for Mozilla.

Because it prevents the worldwide biggest search provider from eventually also taking over those remaining holdouts?

I don't think there's any danger of Google taking over the Chinese market...

Perhaps Yandex is more at risk, but my impression is that Yandex dominates Russia much as Google leads the US. In Russia, Google is the underdog. Firefox's switch can only dampen competition in the Russian market, while users in markets without Yandex neither gain nor lose.

The rest of the world may stand to benefit, if these national champions expand beyond their borders, and if they offer users a better choice than the competition. But that remains to be proven. In the meantime, Mozilla's switch will certainly have a measurable impact on the current competitive landscape.

What should they do in Russia? Help the second biggest player, which is Google? :)

Although TBH, in Russia there are mail.ru(with their search engine) and sputnik.ru (a search engine funded by company called Rostelekom. The majority of it is owned by state/government).

Nowhere does it say that Mozillas new mission is to break up market dominant players.

Their new search strategy is to globally have more search partners than before, while continueing to serve regions with default search that are good/best for that region.

There is no doubt that Baidu gives better result than Google for most Chinese users. I dont know much about Yandex, but Im sure they have a better grasp of the Russian users than Google does right now and thus provides better service.

Will the settings be changed for existing users, or only for new installs?

The new default search engine is changing, so if you are using the current default engine for your country (Google in the US), then your search engine will change to the new default (Yahoo in the US). It will not affect users who are not using the default search engine.

(throwaway account)

While I believe the party line is probably true ("Mozilla decided not to go with Google"), it's also disingenuous.

Mozilla chose not to go with Google because Google wasn't willing to pay what they were before. They straight up told Mozilla this 3 years ago when they signed the billion dollar contract; Mozilla had 3 years to become profitable. That's why they switched focus to FirefoxOS; they thought that by now they'd be profitable via selling phones and the app store. (At the time, Bing was bidding against Google, however Mozilla went with the smaller check from Google because they knew using Bing would seem like selling out.)

For the record, Google made billions off being Firefox's default search engine. They paid Firefox $300mil a year for three years, but that was only a small fraction of how much Google profited from Firefox searches. Not sure if it's still true, but three years ago they made more from Firefox than they did from Chrome.

So, yes, Mozilla could have gone with Google still. It's not like Google said "nope, you can't use us as the default!". However, they went with Yahoo! because Google wasn't willing to pay what Mozilla needed. The whole "Mozilla picked Yahoo! to enable choice" has been tweeted by every Mozillian I know (and said multiple times in this thread), but it's a meaningless statement. If they really meant that, you'd be prompted when you opened Firefox the first time to pick a search engine.

> For the record, Google made billions off being Firefox's default search engine. They paid Firefox $300mil a year for three years, but that was only a small fraction of how much Google profited from Firefox searches. Not sure if it's still true, but three years ago they made more from Firefox than they did from Chrome.

Google doesn't really make money from Firefox or Chrome (the browser), per se (except insofar as Chrome increases the value of things that Google does sell that include it, like Chromebooks, Nexus devices, etc.), it makes money from searches, whether default or not. 3 years ago, sure, more searches -- to Google or any other search provider -- came from Firefox than Chrome because Firefox had more usage share than Chrome. That's rather dramatically reversed since then.

Don't forget that Chrome users are more tech savvy on average than Firefox users, meaning they click ads less.

> Don't forget that Chrome users are more tech savvy on average than Firefox users

I somewhat doubt that. They're both mostly non-default browsers where they are used (and the places where Firefox is default probably have more technically savvy users than those where Chrome is default), Chrome has far and away more current mindshare and is, therefore, probably more likely to be a crowd-inspired (rather than technically-inspired) choice as a non-default browser. I suspect that there was a time when your statement was true, but I don't think its true now. (Though inertia in both camps may make it true even when its less likely to be true for new users.)

> I somewhat doubt that

Ask anybody that runs ads and they'll tell you Chrome ranks last in CTR. See also:

http://chitika.com/insights/2012/web-usage-infographic/

I don't doubt that Chrome has a lower CTR, I just doubt that its particularly because Chrome users are more tech savvy.

I don't doubt that Chrome has a lower (real or, even moreso, measured) CTR, I just doubt that its particularly because Chrome users are more tech savvy.

Tech savvy isn't the only explanation for CTR differences, especially measured CTR difference; ISTR a while ago discussions of what was possible in Chrome v. Firefox for adblocking, and from that it seemed that Chrome ad blockers would still download (but not show) ads, while Firefox wouldn't download them. Don't know if that understanding was accurate or if it is still the case, but that could conceivably result in Chrome impressions being overstated (and CTR being understated) relative to Firefox.

Anecdotally my experience has been quite the opposite. I know a few developers who primarily use Chrome, but besides that the rest are people that heard it was faster, or installed it by mistake as part of a bundle.

Do you have anything other than anecdotal evidence to support this claim?

My "source" is more direct, however this collaborates:

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/12/opera-users-click-on-t...

Even a large difference in CTR wouldn't necessarily say anything about being "more tech savvy". A sub 0.2% difference between Firefox and Chrome is therefore meaningless in this context. That's making the heroic assumption that Chitika Insights data is not biased in some way and can overcome methodological problems (no script, user agent changes, bots clicking ads) even if it was perfectly representative.

I actually don't disagree with this. Even though I'm a pretty tech-savvy Firefox user (and by "tech-savvy", I mean "seasoned Unix administrator and backend programmer"), "Mozilla" is also a household name among plenty of less-tech-savvy folks; I've seen Firefox (often called "Mozilla" or "Netscape" by its users, amusingly enough) everywhere from the most high-tech web development shops to computers owned/operated by seniors and running Windows XP and dial-up internet. Chrome hasn't had that level of adoption yet; while it's certainly popular among the tech-savvy, it hasn't trickled into ordinary households quite the same way as Internet Explorer and "Mozillafire Netfox" have.

It helps that Firefox has a lot of brand maturity in non-tech circles, whether it's referred to as "Firefox" or by the names of its ancestors. It also helps that Firefox is the default browser on the vast majority of desktop GNU/Linux distributions (which are gaining some popularity now that Windows XP is unsupported and being phased out more aggressively), though this probably isn't as significant of a factor as the existing brand recognition/maturity.

which is the point. they get money through firefox/chrome. if they didnt have the firefox search deal, then a lot - lot - lot - less money.

They straight up told Mozilla this 3 years ago when they signed the billion dollar contract; Mozilla had 3 years to become profitable

Source? Sounds like total bullshit because the default search provider obviously gets traffic, which drives ad revenue, from the browser vendors. Why would they need alternate revenue streams, let alone those be required by a search vendor? That does not make any sense.

However, they went with Yahoo! because Google wasn't willing to pay what Mozilla needed. The whole "Mozilla picked Yahoo! to enable choice" has been tweeted by every Mozillian I know (and said multiple times in this thread), but it's a meaningless statement

It is possible Mozilla choose Yahoo because they outbid Google. But economically, that seems questionable. What is not questionable is that this change will drive a lot of users to alternate search engines.

> Mozilla chose not to go with Google because Google wasn't willing to pay what they were before.

I was at the internal Mozilla meeting where this was announced (about an hour ago), and Chris Beard (Mozilla's CEO) said very clearly that all the options this time around were economically stronger than the current Google deal.

Maybe that's not true and you have better information than I do, but since you're posting anonymously it's hard to know.

Is there any monetary reason to pick many search providers instead of just Google? This is possible, your guess is as good as mine. Regardless, I believe that not going with Google is a very sound strategy. If Mozilla has the choice between an alliance with a competitor with overwhelming firepower and whose clear interest is making Mozilla obsolete and an underdog with an interest in growing along with Mozilla, why pick the competitor?

Also, regarding your comment on FirefoxOS: I don't know where you heard that Mozilla expected to support itself through Firefox OS / Firefox Marketplace revenue, but I never heard anybody claiming this (I work at Mozilla). The main reason to introduce Firefox OS was (and still is) to promote openness on the mobile world (i.e. "wrestle duoplogy from Apple and Google"), just as Mozilla/Phoenix/Firefox was introduced to promote openness on the web (i.e. "wrestle monopoly from Microsoft").

Edit: clarifications.

I also see FirefoxOS as Mozilla's long-shot hedge against the spectre of walled gardens. With first iOS and then WinRT disallowing third-party browsers, a world dominated by locked-down platforms would be a death sentence for Firefox.

I always wondered why no one tried lawsuit on that topic in Europe for iOS devices? It is arguably worse than the IE situation (you used IE just once to get a real browser), but right now Safari is only game in town for no technical reason and everyone is cool with that. No addons, no adblock ...

I suppose that's fine legally unless you're a monopoly. Windows is (or was?). iOS, arguably, not really.

It's worthwhile to note that Yandex are, in principle, also a competitor. (They ship their own branded version of Chromium; I'm not sure what level it's built at, whether it's just a different theme and some minor additions, or built from scratch on the Chromium Content API. It is, however, frequently out of date and with known security issues, le sigh…)

Philosophy doesn't put food on the table, so I have no doubt that this deal was motivated by more than a desire to increase choice. But that doesn't necessarily mean that philosophy and financial strategy are in opposition, or that decisions cannot be sought which strike a balance between both (although generally I wouldn't begrudge them if they favored the latter; see my first sentence).

In any case, Mozilla is a public nonprofit and releases public financial statements every year. Even if the numbers regarding this deal aren't public now, they will be by the end of the next fiscal year.

If Mozilla didn't "pick Yahoo! to enable choice", why didn't Yahoo pay for default search placement in all regions? Russia, China, and other countries will have different default search engines.

If they can successfully juggle marketing a good 'party line' and be holding onto their core values and be looking out for their bottom line all at the same time, then I have much more confidence in Mozilla's long term viability going forward. Mozilla's continuing existence is of huge importance to the free and open internet, and this announcement certainly gives me hope that they will do so for at least several more years. Good on them!

I understand you want to remain anonymous, but care to give us a clue about your credibility? Do you work for Mozilla? Google?

Given his comment i can say he works for Mozilla or worked for Mozilla or have good contacts there. What he wrote is 100% truth as far as I'm concerned. (i have good friends at Mozilla myself and that echo their exact words from 3 y ago)

Yes.

Funnily there's noone who actually can be verified as a Mozillian to back it up, heh. Would be hard given that it contains several nonsensical statements. Why on earth would Google care whether Mozilla is profitable? Are there really a lot of people that thought Firefox OS would generate significant income in one of the most competitive markets so fast (I'm sure some people wished, but realistically)? And you honestly don't understand that modally forcing a search provider choice on first run drives nontechnical users away?

Oh hey a throwaway account, what a coincidence.

I'm calling bullshit on this one. Totaly, utter, bullshit.

You'll notice my own account isnt throw away.

Frankly, I doubt it, and I work at Mozilla.

> They paid Firefox $300mil a year for three years

Mozilla's 990 forms are public. For 2012 I see a bit more than $9 million in revenue, of which $5.4 million came from contributions [1]. "$300mil a year" makes no sense -- unless there is something I don't know about how non-profits are supposed to report their revenue.

[1] https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2012_Mozilla_Form_...

There's a difference between the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation. The latter owns the former. Revenue for the former is not revenue for the latter, though dividend payments from the former to the latter are revenues for the latter.

The Form 990 is for the Foundation. You probably want to look at https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi... instead, since that includes the subsidiary Mozilla Corporation. Page number 4 (sixth page of the PDF), the "Revenues and other support" table.

Thanks for the clarification, I wasn't aware there was a for-profit subsidiary.

Technically, a not-for-profit taxable subsidiary. (That makes a difference because the company purpose of Mozilla Corporation is still not to make money/raise shareholder value, despite the fact this it is fully taxable like any other company).

Isn't the purpose of Mozilla Corporation exactly to make money which inures to the benefit of its sole shareholder (Mozilla Foundation), making it just like any for-profit company except that it happens to be owned by a nonprofit?

You may be right (hint) - but that doesn't change the outcome and why Mozillians are retweeting that it enables choice. It actually does.

Thanksfully a company is more than a CEO, CTO, and Legal affairs. In this case the mission matters more than a temporary set of positions - I would think. And either choice wasn't bad for the mission - in fact, more money so that employees can still be paid is probably a smart choice.

Thus you're complaining about the non-openeness about the decision and the slightly twist of words - and that's fair. But again, it may not matter that much.

> They straight up told Mozilla this 3 years ago when they signed the billion dollar contract; Mozilla had 3 years to become profitable.

Wait, why does Google care if Mozilla is profitable?

> Mozilla had 3 years to become profitable.

Mozilla is a non-profit. This doesn't make sense. Google was paying $300M/year to Mozilla, and I seriously doubt that Mozilla's expenses would be more than that. Most of the work is done by unpaid coders anyways; they don't need vast teams of sales people selling Mozilla, it sells by itself.

Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The tax system in the US apparently doesn't take kindly to non-profits funding open-source projects because they "can" be used commercially. e.g. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/open-source-madness

$300 million revenue with ~1,000 employees is about $300,000/employee. Pretty good but no guarantee of profitability.

Mozilla Corporation--the wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and that has gutted Mozilla into a support community that's as organic and empowered as the support communities for any other pseudo-grassroots company--is absolutely a for-profit company.

> Most of the work is done by unpaid coders anyways

The only proper response to this is "lol". If you did a comparison, the skew of Mozilla employee versus non-employee contributions would be even more stark than the respective ones from the stats for the Linux kernel that everyone bandies about all the time.

> they don't need vast teams of sales people selling Mozilla, it sells by itself

Wish you could've got this through to Mozilla this when they were facing the prospects of looking for replacement for John Lilly and everybody seemed to be jumping ship to Facebook. They could've saved a ton of cash on the incompetent business folks they brought in and whose only contribution has been to shit on the Mozilla brand and to "other" the existing volunteer community.

Or are you on some sort of [delay](http://olduse.net/)?

Mozilla is making some major moves these days. They've ditched Google as their main revenue source, partnering with Tor and Yahoo.

Yahoo is angling to be a digital magazine, which I like as a business model much more than Google's.

Firefox is making a strong case for itself as the privacy centric browser.

I still remember when Firefox started gaining market share. Even non-tech-savvy people were getting firefox, because IE was so bad for security, and so hard to maintain.

Excited to see what the next few months brings.

I thought that Google was still far and away their main revenue source?

It has been for the last three years, but Mozilla decided to go with Yahoo/Yandex/Baidu rather than renew the deal with Google. So Yahoo (and others) will replace Google as the main revenue source.

Have they disclosed the new financial terms of the agreement though? I'd be interested to see how the numbers have changed.

The numbers are never disclosed, but they can usually be inferred from Mozilla's public accounting. That'll take a while, though.

The only public numbers are from the the previous Google search deal (the one from 3 years ago). It will be a long time until the details of this new deal are public. In the mean time I (as a Mozilla employee) can say that all of the options Mozilla had for the new search deal were better economically than the now-ending Google deal. This was really nice, because Mozilla got to make a choice that wasn't about money, but was about strategy and what we want in the web instead.

Not any more. That's exactly what this story is about! :)

But the story mentions no $ numbers. Yahoo getting the default for US searches is clearly a big thing. Is that bigger than the rest-of-world searches? I really have no idea and seeing the figures would be very interesting.

Yahoo is angling to be a digital magazine, which I like as a business model much more than Google's.

not sure if srs

> Firefox is making a strong case for itself as the privacy centric browser.

They try their best to market themselves as a privacy-centric browser. To promote themselves as so they add some shiny things like making clearing browser history a two mouse clicks more accessible. But I'm still worried.

I'm really nitpicking but... That 3rd party cookie controversy that lasted for almost an year, the "oh, we're full of FLOSS ideals and are firmly against DRM but... hey, wait, users want Netflix, gotta support DRM" controversy, the recent "sponsored tiles" controversy, the update of over-engineered and undocumented proprietary Firefox Sync/Accounts that makes it even harder to not depend on their servers, the complete ignorance on TLS client certificates' UI and usability (which is why we're still stuck with passwords), the BrowserID/Persona thingy that happily continued the trend that makes your identity owned by a third party, and so on. I know, it's not good to complain in such rude manner, but the issues do exist. Personally, I wouldn't really trust Firefox. Not without lots of addons, at least.

Unfortunately, I guess this can't be helped. A large project like Firefox seems to be impossible without steady and fairly big money income, and since this money comes from advertisers whose interests are in complete opposite of users' privacy, Mozilla just have to make some sacrifices.

Still, among the mainstream browsers they're better than competitors.

I'm not going to rebut each mischaracterization, but I did work on Persona, so:

> the BrowserID/Persona thingy that happily continued the trend that makes your identity owned by a third party

Nah. You could happily choose any Identity Provider that implemented the protocol, including a self-hosted one.

Nope, that's a pretty common misconception though. You surely can own a server (I do) but you just can't own a domain. You're merely leasing one from a registrar.

You see, I strongly believe identity's an intrinsic property of a person, and if you need a provider for one there's something really wrong with the setup. I'm completely fine with asserting notaries, but not providers.

Yes. Identity is an intrinsic property of a person. However, how would you design a system to check this property? It's a very difficult property to measure. Having someone vouching for it is a relatively safe and easy way to do this.

As usual, with credentials.

It's just that credential must be something you can handle by yourself and not require a third party to provide to you. A third party may assert some aspect of your identity by providing a statement that the person who's in possession of the certain credentials has been verified by this notary to indeed have certain properties. But if me and some website are starting to become acquainted why do we need any third party as a strong requirement? When I walk into some office I don't have to show my passport, I just introduce myself and we get to the business. And then, if there's a necessity (!), business owner may ask me to provide some assertions of my identity. I don't see any reason it shouldn't work in a same manner on the web. Like, for example, "Hey there, you may call me Aleksey and here's my, say, public key so you could authenticate me at a later time."

Remembering your face is what a cookie can do for you. You log-in via a trusted 3rd party (that may be owned by you) and you receive a cook for use next time.

If you change your face the next time you walk in, like say you visit from your iPhone instead of you PC, they cant recognize you and will of course need strong verification, after which you may receive a cooking.

This is a workaround. A completely different topic.

My issue with Persona is about its very concepts, not some particular implementation issues.

> you just can't own a domain. You're merely leasing one from a registrar.

That is not true, in a very strict juridical sense.

I don't know about juridical sense and I'm not sure there's one applicable worldwide.

This is true in practice, though. "Your" domain can be seized, blocked or transferred to a third party, its lease terms can be changed to make it unaffordable - and generally there's nothing you can do to prevent this before this happen, since anything of this can happen without involving you at all. That is, because you never possessed this domain, it was merely provided to you. You may just seek the legal remedy after the fact.

On the contrary, identity is something you possess. It can't be revoked by anyone. Your passport (notary assertion) may be stolen, seized or revoked, but your friends won't stop recognizing you as a person. It's just that you won't be able to prove "I'm recognized as $legal_name by government" anymore.

You just won't wake up and see your password set is blocked so you can't login anywhere. Yeah, you can be forced to disclose your credentials, but it's a different story.

> I don't know about juridical sense and I'm not sure there's one applicable worldwide.

The statement is even less true then. I would certainly guess that in every country that leasing is a term, it doesn't match your agreement with your registrar.

> "Your" domain can be seized, blocked or transferred to a third party,

That is trivially true with pretty much anything, in pretty much any country. The police will take back a stolen bicycle and return it to a third party, for example.

But it is a system governed by rules. And so is the domain name. It is yours to use, and will remain yours unless you break the rules. In most countries you can challenge any stolen or revoked domain in court.

> I would certainly guess that in every country that leasing is a term

I'm not talking about how it's called legally. I'm talking how it's actually working. You pay money, you're allowed to control the resource. That looks exactly like leasing to me. You can't buy a domain, so you can't own it. It's that simple

> That is trivially true with pretty much anything, in pretty much any country.

Wrong. It's impossible to make you disclose your private key without your presence, ability and willingness to do so (although you can be forced to disclose, but that's completely another matter). And, obviously, your identity cannot be revoked or seized even if you'd wish for so.

> But it is a system governed by rules. And so is the domain name.

And the rules are made by others and others may change it at any time.

> In most countries you can challenge any stolen or revoked domain in court.

But why do I have to do so in a first place?

Seriously, can you explain me why do I need to entrust my identity to some registrar and ask government to handle that? Or why do I have to pay for a right to posses my identity? I've used to live without those, but now everyone's (Google, Facebook and - what's important and what's the basis of my complaint - Mozilla's continuing the trend) trying to tie me to this third-party-is-necessary approach.

What about Namecoin?

I'm not really knowledgeable on the details but - if I got it right - from the overall image it seems good.

But it's not realistically useable for a time being. I'll be fine totally with Persona when the vast majority could type .bit (or whatever it would be called, I guess NameCoin will evolve somehow by that time) name I own (truly own, yay!) and it would resolve for them.

You'll find some recently-announced privacy initiatives interesting:

* http://blog.mozilla.org/privacy/2014/11/10/introducing-polar...

* http://monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/tracking-pr...

* http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/11/12/quantifying-t...

Thanks. Those look good. Less radical than I could wish for, but certainly good.

Hope the existence of those features will be well-marketed, so they'll be enabled by sufficiently large amount of people to be able to blend into this crowd.

Yes it sucks that Mozilla loses some battles, but you surely must understand that there are stronger players around the world and it is impossible to win every battle.

Firefox today is full of DRM features. They are called plug-ins. What theyre doing is cutting it down to one, secure plugin instead of a few insecure ones. Seems like a step up, though of course you can always wish for more. But again, stronger foes.

I still dont understand the controversy about the tiles. Everybody freaks out that a browser which take in more than 300 million dollars a year in advertisement is going to show an ad. I actually thought selling that space is a good idea. Why should Mozilla give away free traffic like that? They can still quality control the links.

Perfection is the enemy of good.

Also let's remember the humble bundle, and the new Mozilla Developer Browser

It's always seemed as though Google's and Mozilla's relationship would weaken over the years, though honestly I expected Bing rather than Yahoo to be the one to step up and fill Google's shoes. Also surprising is that apparently Mozilla was the one to initiate the switch.

As a Firefox user, all in all I'm rather pleased. I've just tried a few of my typical searches on Yahoo and though the expected links aren't the top results (seeing links for Rust-the-game instead of Rust-the-language...), they're on the first page. Let's see if that improves with time as I use it more. And I'm happy to support some more diversity in this space.

The new Yahoo search that's coming soon is meant to be much better. So I suggest you reserve your judgment until then :)

Is it still based on Bing?

Nope.

isn't yahoo search powered by bing anyway?

It uses the Bing index, but there are at least some differences in how it retrieves and prioritizes results. (If you run the same search on yahoo and bing, even with fresh cookies, you won't normally get identical results.)

Yahoo may do some spidering of their own as well, although not to my knowledge. I know at least the above is true though. Also as an aside the Yahoo BOSS API is significantly more powerful than the comparable Azure Bing web search API. Unfortunately, they also just doubled the access price this month.

honestly I expected Bing

That would have been a twist that noone in 2001 would have seen coming.

As a long time Mozilla lover, I have been quite concerned about their dependence on Google for quite some time now. I'm really thankful that they have had the courage to cut ties. Must have been a scary decision.

Note that Mozilla is making Yahoo reinstate support for Do-Not-Track, which it had dropped earlier this year.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2150981/yahoo-drops-do-not-tr...

Yahoo will only respect DNT for Firefox users. This is because DNT was essentially ruined after Microsoft turned DNT on by default in IE. Since it didn't represent an explicit user choice, it carried much less weight. It is an explicit choice in Firefox.

And how will they target only Firefox users? Should we expect IE to start masquerading as <insert Mozilla browser> again?

What is funny is that they are:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/11/11/living-on-the-...

What if, and this is crazy I know, you needed an explicit action to track me instead of relying on users not knowing such a thing exists to avoid.

You're going to love Firefox's new Tracking Protection feature, which is currently under development: http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/11/12/quantifying-t...

It allows you to block things coming from known tracking domains, giving better privacy and faster page loads on many sites.

Why would anyone need that when there's ghostery and noscript? Furthermore, what benefits does that feature have over ghostery? Seems like ghostery blocks more than that feature does, which makes it seem like that's a waste of effort.

I suppose it might have some use if it's actually on by default, but they haven't stated that it will be, and if it isn't on by default, then anyone who would know to turn it out would be able to install ghostery anyway.

Well, for one thing, Ghostery is veeeeery slow (or was last time I checked). For a second thing, what makes you think that it's going to block less than Ghostery?

The benefit is that this is built in to the browser, meaning more users will use it. If you want the extra protection of Ghostery, then by all means, go for it. This is easier for other users.

Is this what will replace (as a meta-solution, it appears) the backed-out third party cookie blocking stuff?

Well, if that is the case, then you would be tracked. Read the parent comment.

DNT was a terribly flawed idea anyway.

If you don't want to be tracked — just don't allow to track yourself. Make your digital fingerprint as indistinguishable as possible and don't persist anything for any longer that's required to work.

And how many users can do that? I'm pretty experienced, I know a number of the fingerprinting techniques that can be used to track me, and I have no idea how I can browse while avoiding them all.

You're right. But still, DNT is snake oil that only makes things worse by providing a false sense of privacy while not resolving any issue.

And some fingerprinting issues that can't be solved by lone users could be solved by browser vendors. Let's at least start by doing something with those overlong User-Agent headers. And, say, limiting JavaScript capabilities on introspecting the environment.

Well, for one thing, this would Break The Web (tm). I assume that users of, say, TorBrowser would not mind, but I strongly doubt the greater public would accept that.

For another thing, these two measures would only force the trackers to switch to other fingerprinting mechanisms that are harder to turn off (ETags, canvas 2d/3d fingerprinting, CSS fingerprinting, etc.), so I don't think this would achieve what you hope.

It won't break the web any more than not supporting <blink> tag or deprecating SHA-1 certificates anymore. It would affect a tiny minority of sites that try to do weird things. Seriously, we had a lot of JS APIs being gradually deprecated (and, yeah, breaking the web), and we're still alive. And for the last ten years every web developer was constantly told to not depend on User-Agent headers and do capability checks instead of UA detection. If there are still some sites doing that, and a reason for a change exists - it's good time to break them and only make work with some compatibility mode.

And those were just the examples. Sure, the trackers will switch. ETags and CSS fingerprinting and any other tracking methods can be worked around too. We just have to start value privacy a bit more than dancing bunnies.

(But, sure thing, users want dancing bunnies, not privacy)

Many "stealth" techniques actually make you more trackable on the web. The person wearing a mask is easy to track in a crowd.

The correct link is https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-an.... Seems the link was changed.

They're separate posts, I hadn't seen that one until you shared it. I think it's a better article than this one, and would be happy if a mod changed the link and title. :D

Oh, my mistake entirely.

The original link is now redirecting to the better link anyway, so I've changed the title to match the new article.

Looks like a smart move by Yahoo to be the default search for a major browser: google/chrome, bing/ie. This also means that Firefox will likely get some serious support from Yahoo in $$s to build back market share. Question is can they catch Google?

Don't forget though that Yahoo Search runs off Bing.

But for how long? They've reached the mid-point on the Bing deal. Yahoo has been working on two search projects internally. They want to own search once again.

Does Yahoo's 10-year search deal with Microsoft/Bing restrict Yahoo from working on competing (i.e. not internal) search engines? Is Yahoo developing their own search engine, just waiting to deploy it when the Microsoft/Bing deal expires in 2020? :)

Good questions heh. The Mozilla deal is 5 years right? Plausible that this allows them to push forward in the search avenue without compromising the Bing deal while continuing the work on their own tech. I'm a big believer in Marissa Mayer's strategy so in full support of this Mozilla deal.

> They want to own search once again.

Yahoo! never owned search before. The brief period where Yahoo! Search was an independent, rather than provided by a third party, was after Google became dominant (and Google was the last exclusive provider of Yahoo! Search before that independent period, which ended with the most recent Bing deal.) Before Google, Yahoo! Search was Inktomi (who was later bought by Yahoo! after Yahoo! stopped relying on them), and before that AltaVista (also later bought by Yahoo!)

Yahoo! has only ever owned being the interface to search.

I remember both AOL, and Prodigy defaulted to Yahoo, when you had to list your site with Yahoo to be returned in results. When they called themselves a Directory. It was not quite search, but it was their own results, and they dominated the market.

Edit: type-o/clarity.

> I remember both AOL, and Prodigy defaulted to Yahoo, when you had to list your site with Yahoo to be returned in results. When they called themselves a Directory.

Yeah, that was the pre-search strategy that Yahoo! (and others) pursued, and Yahoo! did own that for a while (I'd argue that their focus on such a curated list while search ramped up is what left them behind on search, leading to them relying on series of search providers -- which they kept buying up even after abandoning them as search providers), but they never caught up even when after those acquisitions they tried to go it alone.

So, sure, maybe they want to own search the same way they owned curated-directory-based web information, but that's different from wanting to own search again.

Fair enough. Though I would say it still counts as search, whether they're crawling the internet or forcing sites to sign up manually.

I agree that the focus on a curated list is what held them behind, though it may be nice if someone were to provide that today at scale.

It'll be very interesting to see what this does to Bing's marketshare in six months or so, since Yahoo's search runs through Bing.

Although we might never find out, I'm very curious to find out the terms of the deal. Did Yahoo pay more? What about Microsoft? Were MS as motivated since they, essentially had two horses in the race (Bing and Yahoo) vs. Google? Lots of fun little details.

Edit: Typos

>It'll be very interesting to see what this does to Bing's marketshare in six months or so, since Yahoo's search runs through Bing.

Does Yahoo do their own tweaks? I just checked my site's ranking for a few terms in Bing vs. Yahoo. Bing gave much the same results as Google, whereas my site ranked significantly worse in Yahoo.

"Question is can they catch Google?"

I don't think so...but maybe in Yahoo's next 3 or 4 earnings reports they can say 'search revenues are up 50% this quarter' which will boost their stock price and lead to financial articles titled 'Will $YHOO kill $GOOG?'

> Question is can they catch Google?

I suppose they could, if they went for the same questionable bundling [1] and SEO [2] tactics as Google :)

Adding to that the fact that Google occasionally promotes Chrome on their various products (search engine et. al.), they haven't been particularly fair all in all. I doubt Mozilla will go that low, and I doubt they could gain significant ground even if they did.

[1] https://blog.avast.com/2009/12/03/avast-and-google-chrome

[2] https://plus.google.com/+MattCutts/posts/NAWunDzJSHC

I hadn't thought about it before, but I wonder if Yahoo would be willing to front a Firefox advertising campaign across its portals; similar to how Google used to (stil does?) promote Chrome across its own properties.

Yahoo! is OK, but... Yandex and Baidu are not exactly recommended company for an organization that pretends to hold the Open Web's moral higher ground. They practice large-scale censorship, they are instruments of repressive regimes. How does that make any sense?

Note that Mozilla has had revenue arrangements with Yandex and Baidu previously. And Google doesn't exactly have clean hands in China itself.

> Note that Mozilla has had revenue arrangements with Yandex and Baidu previously. And Google doesn't exactly have clean hands in China itself.

What did Google do in China? I remember them pulling out of China, declining to participate further in censorship there, and being attacked (hacked) by the Chinese government. What am I forgetting?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google#China has a short summary. You're correct that since 2010 they've refused to assist with government censorship; I had been thinking of what came before that. I think you have a good point that today, Google is the better actor in China.

As you mention with the Wikipedia ref, there was controversy with Google's early attempts to work in China. What happens here is that Google tried to do a "best-effort" service for Chinese users, with the assumption that partial service would be much better than no service (and certainly WAY better than what Chinese users get from their own web companies like Baidu, that not only enforce censorship but also report "bad users" to the government, actively help to spy on dissidents etc.--something Google never considered doing). The search UI would notify users that some results were excluded due to government-enforced restriction, which was at least transparent--and not unlike what Google has to do today in the EU with the "right to be forgotten" censorship. But this wasn't good enough for the PRC, their firewall would impose harsh punishment to users who tried to browse forbidden things; I don't remember details now but it was like: you try to search for certain words, you'd be cut off the internet and not only your IP but other people too. So in a later attempt, Google search tried to warn users in advance, with a customized Google Instant so the user could avoid submitting a "bad" query that could result in blocking. This idea didn't work because the firewall was quickly updated to crack down on it, and I think that was the last attempt, then Google desisted to fight this battle because any progress would clearly require too much compromising, more than could be justified by an attempt to provide a pragmatic, partial service.

[Disclaimer: Googler, but not especially intimate with the events above; none of this is internal info either, it's all widely reported stuff.]

I'm completely against current behavior of the russian government and I use Google on daily basis. However, I can't see how Yandex should be considered to be the company "that practice large-scale censorship, they are instruments of repressive regimes"? This is a great company, which contributes both to open source and science (numerous collaborations with CERN, etc.). And it really tries to fight for the web freedom here in Russia, which involves a huge risk for their business. Speaking of censorship: I'm often see message regarding DMCA in Google search results, nearly never seen them in Yandex.

Because Yandex is based in Russia, it has no alternative but to share its data with the government. If you value your privacy, avoid using any Russian-based search engines or social networks if you live in Russia.

Did you mean Yandex? Yahoo! is based in California.

> If you value your privacy, avoid using any Russian-based search engines or social networks if you live in Russia

Pushing this forward, if you so much value your privacy you should not use any service which has official representatives (official company behind it), because in many countries they should provide user data on goverment requests (e.g. http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/RU...). This is a disturbing fact, but this is how modern society works. You should throw out the window all your electronic devices and move somethere to the North Pole to protect your privacy (and I can't guarantee that satellite will not watching you). "Privacy" nowadays is just a huge illusion which is an euphemism for the statement: "Somehow, you can be sure they will not come for you for what you doing. For now...".

Note that is affects only U.S.-based users of Firefox. Good move for both parties, and I hope they can struck deals with regional search engines in other locations as well. Diversification is good for everybody.

I too think that diversity helps: google has a monopoly in search, and a push for yahoo in search queries may even help them make the search engine better, and maybe they will become a much needed google competitor.

Does Yahoo still operate a search engine? I thought they used Bing.

Mozilla and Google have been "frenemies" for a while. Now that Firefox is no longer supporting Google's search monopoly, I wonder how Google's search traffic (and stock price) will look in six months. I think Mozilla's decision is good for increasing search competition.

It will be same. Unless Yahoo have a real winning product (which given their track record, I doubt) people will just switch to google.

The real question is did Google stop paying? did Yahoo offer way more? Or did Mozilla want to break out from Google's shadow?

Edit: I mean to say did Google decide to end it, or did Mozilla, and why?

Yup, they didn't renew the google contract

Mozilla was the one who decided not to renew.

All of the potential partnerships (including going with Google again) offered an improvement economically over the last deal partnership.

Mozilla chose not to go with Google again.

Mozilla's deal with Google ran it's course. Instead of inking a new deal with Google, Mozilla decided to go with another option.

There was a strong option in place from Google, but Mozilla decided not to go with them as a global default in order to promote choice.

I don't think I follow this argument. Can you explain it further? It feels like Yahoo probably just offered more money.

Google currently has the overwhelming share of the search market, which means a large advertising income. If other players get a bigger chunk of the pie, that means more competition.

Both Google and Yahoo offered options with strong, economic terms. But it came down to a decision of values, and where Mozilla wanted to see the Internet in the future (again, full of choice, diversification, and healthy competition). What happens next is anyone's guess.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-an...

Google has been the Firefox global search default since 2004. Our agreement came up for renewal this year, and we took this as an opportunity to review our competitive strategy and explore our options.

In evaluating our search partnerships, our primary consideration was to ensure our strategy aligned with our values of choice and independence, and positions us to innovate and advance our mission in ways that best serve our users and the Web. In the end, each of the partnership options available to us had strong, improved economic terms reflecting the significant value that Firefox brings to the ecosystem. But one strategy stood out from the rest.

Compared to the previous deal (where Google was the global default), the new deal also leaves Mozilla more free to pursue different partnerships worldwide. For example, Yandex is now the default Firefox search engine in Russia (as it was three years ago, before the global Google deal).

You mean Yandex in Russia. Baidu is China :)

Fixed, thanks.

If Mozilla wanted to promote choice, why not present the user with an option of some sort? I fail to see how picking s default provider counts as "choice".

We do and have offered the ability to choose your search provider freely for years, and that is not going to change.

But the choice isn't by default. Users must go explicitly choose. If Mozilla wanted to "promote choice", they'd prompt the user to pick a search engine on first use. Or use a default and make noise about changing. Like how FF reminds you about your rights, or asks to join customer feedback program.

I don't see how Yahoo promotes choice over Google, unless by choice you mean promote competition by going against the market leader. Which is fine, and I dislike Google, so good on y'all. But I don't get the point if euphemisms.

Yikes I never realized Mozilla was so dependent on Google

  % of Revenue from Google Search Royalties:

  2013 Not released yet (usually 11 months! after end of year)
  2012 88% (90% of 304,539/311,005)
  2011 84% (85% of 161,904/163,474)
  2010 83% (84% of 121,109/123,206)
  2009 84% (86% of 101,537/104,305)
  2008 98% (91% of 83,600/77,737)
  2007 80% (88% of 68,238,803/75,125,640)
  2006 78% (85% of 61,561,496/66,840,850)
  2005 91% (95% of 50,516,268/52,906,602)

Sources:

2012 - https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...

2011 - http://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla%20Foundatio...

2010 - http://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla%20Foundatio...

2009 - http://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-2009-audit...

2008 - http://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-2008-audit...

2007 - http://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-2007-audit...

2006 - http://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-2006-audit...

2005 - http://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-2005-audit...

Where else did you imagine their money coming from?

It's a non-profit serving the public interest so I had assumed donations from individuals and foundations would be a bigger source of revenue. It looks like they have collected less than $2.2 million in the 8 years covered by the financials. This is nothing for a organization that spent $150 million last year.

I hope they got a generous deal from Yahoo - who has a ton of Alibaba cash burning a hole in their pocket - but the fundamentals of a shrinking desktop advertising market and share don't look good.

Honestly I dont see how this is a "choice". In fact this sounds exactly opposite of the choice. In this particular case Firefox has made the choice on our behalf that we are better off using Yahoo's crappy search results instead of market leader Google.

If you are making a browser which is focused on giving freedom to users you are supposed to :

1. Either let the users chose the search engine as an on-boarding step. 2. Offer industry best/leader as default.

In this particular case Firefox has made a suboptimal choice on our behalf in the name of "choice".

How exactly is this different from :

1. Comcast taking more money from Netflix to give them better bandwidth ?

Now my grandmother will end up seeing 0 organic search results above the fold and will have to learn to either change the search settings or simply use that icon with Red Green and Yellow around a blue dot (Chrome).

Mozilla are known for their doublespeak (best example to-date being https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publish...), but this is one of their more honest pieces - they are giving users a choice of search engines; nonetheless, I can see why the title rubs you the wrong way, and I'd also prefer the original one which was "Yahoo and Mozilla form Strategic Partnership".

> Now my grandmother will end up seeing 0 organic search > results above the fold

Part of the deal is that Yahoo improves the presentation of search results so that this doesn't happen.

Haven't they done something like this before? I remember Yahoo promoting a Yahoo-branded Firefox. It's default search and homepage were Yahoo, and every titlebar had "Firefox and Yahoo" at the end instead of just "Firefox."

Yeah, there was an experimental Firefox + Yahoo distro, for download on Yahoo's servers. There was also a Firefox + Bing distro, iirc.

This seems like a positive step forward for Mozilla (away from Google) but there's no denying how much more awesome this announcement would have been if the new default search provider was DuckDuckGo :)

I'd swear this happened already... I updated Firefox on an old Android tablet yesterday and the default search was already switched to Yahoo. Edit: ah, now that you mention it, it was a Beta version.

Firefox for Android has been testing Yahoo as the default search engine for a few months. Mozilla's search deal with Google did not cover mobile browsers. Firefox OS uses Bing.

Firefox OS does not use Bing. It used Bing a long time ago but all consumer devices are set to Google these days.

Pre-release versions (Beta, Aurrora, Nightly) on Android have been running experiments with Yahoo for a while.

"Google will also continue to power the Safe Browsing and Geolocation features of Firefox."

It's disappointing to hear that Firefox isn't yet using Mozilla's location services project [1].

Background: These are the services that will, say, take the SSID of your current WiFI access point and map that to a latitude/longitude. My understanding is that almost all commercial users subscribe to Skyhook Wireless's database[2], other than Google, which has built its own WiFi AP maps using its StreetView trucks.

I think Mozilla's "open" service, contributed by individual users, is a welcome alternative, since it means you no longer have to send your location to a large corporation on every look-up.

[1] https://location.services.mozilla.com/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless

It's almost certainly down to the fact the Mozilla project just doesn't have the coverage yet.

I'm getting 500 errors. Google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oALd2oT...

For me at least then moving away from google is a huge selling point. I think if they marketed themselves as a googless web experience it could be really good for them.

What will be the default engine in countries not listed in post? It is not exactly clear, apart from saying that Google will be pre-installed (but not default?).

Does this mean Yahoo outbid Google for being the new default search? How much is the deal worth? What about outside the US?

Outside the US it's Yandex and Baidu for their respective locales.

Um, there's more to the world outside the US than Russia and China...

That doesn't appear to have been announced. I wonder if it's because the EU was asleep.

One question: wasn't Yahoo supposed to be a part of Bing at some point?

I think they made a deal that Yahoo search results would be provided by bing

Yahoo has used Bing's search infrastructure for awhile but they've kept the independent front-end and, based on my logs, some level of crawling, presumably to keep their options open so they could switch in the future.

I think yahoo is/was sending off search results to Bing. A long time ago they used to send them to Google. Before that they would refer to themselves as a web directory, not a search engine. And WAYY before that every result page had a link to search on different sites, web crawler, lycos, maybe even google my memory is kind of fuzzy.

The point is that Yahoo cares more about getting people to their portal, not so much what technology it happens to be using.

When Microsoft failed to purchase Yahoo to $47.5bn billion in 2008, they reached a 10-year deal in 2009 for Yahoo to use Bing's infrastructure and "backend" for search [1]. Yahoo provides their own UI/UX and Microsoft provides the actual data.

So, technically, Firefox will be showing very similar (if not identical) results to Bing.

[1]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm

I can't get at the post, so maybe they answer this, but... in this thread, I'm seeing that it's Yahoo! in the U.S., Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China. That seems to leave... a lot of the globe unspoken for. What's the default search for those places?

I can get at the post and I also couldn't see anything about the default outside of US/Russia/China.

What makes this particularly interesting is the rest of the globe includes some of Firefox's strongest markets. My gut suggests this is obscure because Google will remain the default there, but that's just a guess.

EDIT: My gut seems to be wrong. The Yahoo post on this ( http://yahoo.tumblr.com/1313 ) mentions "the long-term framework we developed with Mozilla for future product integrations and expansion into international markets". I think that means Yahoo will end up being the default outside Russia and China, though the rollout may take some time.

More details, Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China, etc.

Anyone have any insights into this? From the outside it looks like Mozilla is parting ways with Google because of Chrome. Interesting they went with Yahoo and not Bing.

> Anyone have any insights into this? From the outside it looks like Mozilla is parting ways with Google because of Chrome.

Looks more like Mozilla is parting ways with Google because of money -- whether Yahoo! offering more than Google has in the past or Google offering less.

(Though, looking at historical usage share measures, there's a good argument that if Google is offering less, its likely because Chrome eclipsing Firefox -- and by some measures IE -- has reduced the value of default search placement in Firefox.)

if Google is offering less, its likely because Chrome eclipsing Firefox -- and by some measures IE -- has reduced the value of default search placement in Firefox

Yahoo is looking at the same marketshare numbers, so that actually can't be the reason.

> Yahoo is looking at the same marketshare numbers, so that actually can't be the reason.

It certainly can be the reason that Google's offer isn't as strong -- the value of default search place in the third-place-with-continuing-declining-share browser is conceivably quite different to a party that owns what is, depending on which measure you look at, either the first- or second-place browser and a party that doesn't have any browser.

I don't see how that follows. Why would it? That x% of users represents X amount of users who click ads, which means y% of lost revenue. Why would the monetary value of that y% be so different to another search engine vendor?

Either it's scaling effects (owning a few percent makes you more known, which drives new users) or Yahoo is better at selling ads through those users. Note that in the former case, there's even more incentive for Google to block. And if the second is true, oh boy, they certainly have a problem at G...

It's not that interesting. Yahoo is under a lot of pressure to grow and just got a windfall of cash from the Alibaba IPO. This is an easy place for them to grow their revenue.

Yahoo has a ton of cash it didn't have until recently and a CEO who wants growth and is willing to overspend.

Mozilla is parting ways with Google because it is in line with their values, to promote choice and show that the web is for everyone.

Although it may seem so from the outside, the whole Firefox vs. Chrome rivalry is blown out of proportion. Many people at Mozilla are happy that there is choice in what browser you can use, instead of the IE monopoly there used to be.

What's interesting about it? Microsoft killed the company which mozilla originated from. And they were created for the sole purpose not to let Microsoft has a monopoly on the gateway to the Internet...

> they were created for the sole purpose not to let Microsoft has a monopoly on the gateway to the Internet...

Created by Google. People often forget (or don't know) that Microsoft's IE once almost had a browser monopoly. Many online applications accepted only IE as browser. Surprisingly, Microsoft did not fight hard to keep the monopoly and even dissolved their team of IE developers. Google and 'their' Firefox took the opportunity. I never understood why Google created their own browser instead of tightening their already strong relationship to Mozilla.

Contrary to most opinions here, I think that Mozilla's decision is more likely the beginning of the end than a promising "strategic partnership".

> I never understood why Google created their own browser instead of tightening their already strong relationship to Mozilla.

Most likely because they couldn't own Mozilla. Just as Apple created Safari instead of promoting either Firefox or Camino, because they couldn't own Mozilla.

Both cases are companies that attempt to own the entire silo.

> Contrary to most opinions here, I think that Mozilla's decision is more likely the beginning of the end than a promising "strategic partnership".

We shall see. However, I believe that the previous situation was unhealthy: Mozilla was funded mostly by a competitor with a clear and present interest in making Firefox irrelevant.

What's interesting about it? Microsoft killed the company which mozilla originated from. \

I don't have any internal knowledge, but I would like to point out that it can be more than one thing.

There's Chrome, in competition with Firefox, Mozilla's core business. There's also Google increasingly looking like a search monopoly, whereas Mozilla's mission is to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet." There's also the fact that Google are now feeling so secure about their grip on search that they were looking to reduce the amount they were paying to Mozilla in their partnership.

Individually, perhaps none of the reasons was quite enough for Mozilla to ditch their partnership with Google, but combined, it makes a whole lot of sense.

google has been apple's greatest competitor for a while. apple has > $160B in cash. mobile bing is comparable to mobile google. the strategic value of weakening google seems to far outweigh the financial value of defaulting to google search (assuming google is willing to outbid microsoft). so why hasn't apple defaulted to bing yet, and when will it?

It is hard to figure out what a "strategic partnership" really means at the moment but ..

- I hope this strategic partnership does not mean 0 organic search results above the fold. That is what Yahoo is doing at the moment. - I hope FF does not come up with any Yahoo spyware/Toolbars etc.

Search is a weird thing on internet.

I don't believe that will be the case. I personally believe Yahoo can step up and deliver an improved search experience.

It would be nice to have search engine keybindings too. Stupid example Ctrl+K Ctrl+<Initial> to pick an engine (hopefully not too many starts with the same letter).

Even better, hell revolutionary : multiple search at once. /s/m

I do * Ctrl + L to use DDG (my default search engine); * Ctrl + L "go" to use Google; * Ctrl + L "tlf" to search in my dictionary; * etc.

To set this up, lookup the documentation of "keywords" in Firefox.

Pardon my french, but Dude, where did you learn about that ? I'm not the finest follower but I care about this kind of features and scroll through changelogs and missed this entirely. This is beautiful.

damn, the abstracted bookmark url is at least from 2006 http://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html

#dumbfounded

I'm really curious about the financial angle of this. I'm wondering how much was gained/lost based on the decision they made versus making a deal with Google for a similar system as in the past.

Anyone interested in search engine alternatives should look into yacy! Its distributed and runs locally. You can share your node with others of you really want to help :)

FYI blog.mozilla.org is down, IT people are working on it.

Is this why Firefox mobile started using Yahoo as the default and I can't change it? I tried changing it and it just kept using Yahoo.

Yes and no. Changeable search engines were obviously a prerequisite for this kind of deal, and Yahoo was one of the first ones to offer the needed APIs (and IIRC, over HTTPS which was required by Mozilla).

Changing search engines can be done via Customize->Search->Installed search engines. Click the one you want and you'll get a popup offering to remove it or make it the default.

I use mobile firefox as well and it switched to yahoo as well. i could change it back without any issue. i think they changed defaults - but if you had put your own engine yourself it didnt.

Curious - do people here view the Yahoo! Search Experience to be better or worse than Google Search?

This is kind of a moot point. If you read the article carefully, you'll notice that Yahoo will be bringing "a new, re-imagined Yahoo search experience to Firefox users in the U.S"

> "a new, re-imagined Yahoo search experience to Firefox users in the U.S"

I wonder if or how Yahoo's "re-imagined" search experience will be affected for non-Firefox users.

UPDATE: Yahoo's press release says their "clean, modern, and immersive search experience that will launch first to Firefox’s U.S. users in December and then to all Yahoo users in early 2015."

http://yahoo.tumblr.com/1313

Interesting that Firefox users get it first. If they're clever (I think they are), that's a tactic to help Mozilla with user acquisition. (assuming the reimagined search experience is something that they can make people want to try)

That's just corporate non-sense. It will be Bing's results with a different stylesheet and different set of ads.

Actually it makes sense IMO. Current yahoo "stylesheet" and ads are freaking terrible. If they bring a clean UI with few or no ads this makes it way more useable.

To be blunt, where's the innovation in Yahoo! Search? They're using Bing data and the result page images in the article look like a clone of Google's.

Here's the option to suppress the change - http://i.imgur.com/HwHqQU9.png

It's worth noting that Google isn't disappearing from Firefox; you will still be able to manage your search engines as you have before.

But not in the "new tab" page I assume?

The "new tab" page in recent versions of Firefox uses whichever search engine you select in the search toolbar. So it's easy to switch it to Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, or others.

I was already unchecked in mine.

Clicking the search drop-down and picking the engine you want takes even less time.

I'm not sure that will affect this. I believe that's for updates to user-installed search engines, which are distributed and updated separately from the browser. Default search engines are part of the browser code itself, so they update when the application does.

Note that Google will still be included as an option, so all you need to do is click on the search box icon to choose it.

(I'm an occasional Firefox contributor and I once worked on the search engine and add-on manager code a little bit, but I'm not an expert so take this with a grain of salt.)

Doesn't that mean that Google giving up on one of the biggest markets means they no longer need Mozilla and it can ditch it's support altogether? Will Yahoo be able to support Moz as Google did? Will this became precedence for other countries too (aside from exceptions like Russia's yandex)?

You're assuming Google gave up on Mozilla, and not the other way around. Your assumption is incorrect.

This makes me less likely to use Mozilla, but I was already a Chrome or Safari user (despite supporting the Mozilla mission).

Seems like a bad decision for Mozilla.

Yahoo will just replace Google as the default search engine for Firefox users in the US. Like Yahoo and Bing in today's Firefox, Google will still be an option.

Why does this make you less likely to use Firefox? The default search engine is just that: the default. You can change it to something else, and always have been able to. If you care enough to know what search engine you use, you should be able to change it.

> You can change it to something else, and always have been able to.

You can't change the default search engine in Firefox for Android, at least through the UI. And mobile is a high-frequency user of search, which makes that decision even more interesting.

Of course you can. Well at least in Nightly you can, it's possible this was reworked recently (and today's announcement would explain why).

Menu > Settings > Customize > Search. Tapping any of the search providers brings up an option to set it as the default. Are you using an older version? (Tested on v33.1)

Why would this be a bad decision, or make you less likely to use Firefox? Mozilla exists in large part due to the abuses that come with monopolistic control over the Internet. Google is dangerously close to that line.

Choosing a different partner seems like the most mission-aligned option for Mozilla.

Making the product worse, from the perspective users care about, for ideals.

FF, for instance, made their multi-browser "sync" horribly complicated for users, to preserve zero knowledge, which is the opposite of what 99% of users wanted.

Chrome made it simple (and THEN added a fairly decent ZK option buried in advanced).

What makes Mozilla/Firefox relevant is having enough users that it can't be ignored. Mozilla is already increasingly irrelevant due to mobile (Firefox OS is nice promise, but Safari and Chrome are dominating the space); marginalizing their desktop product doesn't help.

Yeah, Sync could be improved a lot. The good news is that we are working on it, and I have hopes that the next version will solve all issues (both performance and UX) without sacrificing privacy.

Now, if the question is whether adopting Yahoo & co will be bad for the user experience, Mozilla is betting on the fact that these smaller search providers can deliver not just a comparable experience, but also innovation from many sources.

"The next version" is already out. We moved away from the ZK sync a while ago, and use a much more user friendly model now.

I was thinking of CloudSync.

That doesn't make sense.

You can switch the default search engine if you want, you can choose between them, you can even add keywords for fast access so "g query" searches on Google and "s query" searches on StackOverflow (I don't really get why DuckDuckGo users prefer their queries to go through DDG). Like open Firefox, go to StackOverflow.com, highlight their search input, right click and choose "Add Keyword for this Search". That's what power users are doing.

Plus Firefox has the Awesome Bar which has brought me back to it after using Chrome for some time - as it does a great job of doing full-text searches in your history if you only remember a word or two in the title. By comparison Chrome wants you to do searches on Google and that's like looking for a needle in a haystack.

As for the move to Yahoo! - well, whatever keeps them doing the awesome work that they are doing. Plus people bitched and moaned about Mozilla being dependent on Google's cash flow. Apparently not.

Myself, I'll try it out (haven't been using Yahoo! in a long time) and if it doesn't work out then that's OK, I'll just switch back to Google, though DDG is starting to grow on me.

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