The Mozilla Foundation has made a brave move and parted company with Google.
We say brave move because the search engine outfit has been financing the maker of Firefox more than $100 million a year for the joy of being the default search engine on its browser. It is not as if the Mozzarella Foundation is rolling in cash and that cash was 85 per cent of the outfit’s money.
That deal, last renewed for a three-year period in 2011, has ended, and this time it will not be renewed. Mozilla announced today that the free browser vendor is switching to a range of different search providers. In the US, Firefox will now default to using Yahoo; in Russia it will use Yandex, and in China, Baidu.
As part of the deal, Yahoo is going to start honouring the Do Not Track feature when used by Firefox users to limit Yahoo's ability to track user activity across the Web through advertisements. Yahoo is also going to roll out a new search interface for American Firefox users, starting in December.
Mozilla was increase embarrassed by the fact that Google which makes its number one rival – chrome was its default browser. Swapping to Yahoo will probably no big deal for users, they will just switch the default browser when they install in anyway. However, it is not clear how much cash Mozilla is going to get from Yahoo for the swap and if it will be enough to cover the loss of all that Google dosh.