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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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)

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.

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