For many years now, each time we installed Firefox we had Google as the preinstalled search engine. However, it seems that the partnership between the two global companies has come to an end a few days ago and now Marissa Mayer and the leaders of the Mozilla Foundation shake hands over a new engagement.
The partnership between Firefox and Yahoo has been made for the upcoming 5 years, and the main reason for that, according to Mozilla, is the fact that they want to promote competition and innovation. It’s a little hard to figure out how exactly this will pan out in regards to the user bases, but what we do know is that Google does have its search engine in Chrome, and this way Mozilla wants to end, or at least subjugate the supremacy of this major search engine.
From Yahoo’s side, they call it the most important partnership they made recently, and thanks to it they will be able to gain a major piece of the market, considering that Firefox is still one of the most widely used browsers on the whole web, even though it was in decline in the last few years. It’s great for Yahoo to be in front of more users because they have a great search engine and being able to increase their dominance in the mobile and desktop market is essential.
It’s unclear how much benefit will Yahoo have from this deal, but one thing is certain, and that is the fact that Google will receive a hit. How large and what importance will this have it’s still hard to specify, but we can rest assured that it will be felt in some way or another.
According to some statistics, Firefox users are performing more than 100 billion searches per year, so yahoo can definitely increase its market share exponentially. And as if that wasn’t enough, Mozilla has also made other changes as well.
This comes from the fact that Firefox will have Yahoo as the default search engine in the US, but other major markets will receive other search engines as well. In fact, China will use Baidu just like it did until now, and Yandex Search will become the default in Russia.
We consider this move to be a great, although bold one from Mozilla’s part. They might not want to damage Google’s numbers, but as a company, it’s always great to check your other options and see how you can evolve.
Overall, integrating Yahoo in Firefox is a major change in the browser world and we can rest assured that this particular move will come with quite a lot of repercussions. Will they be good or bad, it’s a little too early to specify, but this move is great and it shows, once again, how unpredictable the online landscape really is.
Photo credit: TechCrunch
