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New Search Engines in Firefox

posted by martyb on Saturday November 22 2014, @05:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the should-name-a-search-engine:-"Sir Ch" dept.

bookreader writes:

Mozilla announced a change to their strategy for Firefox search partnerships. They are ending the practice of having a single global default search provider. Instead, the default search provider would be determined by location in the following ways:

  • United States: Yahoo (new five year deal), who would support the Do Not Track setting in Firefox
  • Russia: Yandex
  • China: Baidu

Google - together with Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other (depending on location) will continue to be a pre-installed search option. While not a default search provider, Google is not fully out - they will continue to power the Safe Browsing and Geolocation features of Firefox.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by melikamp on Saturday November 22 2014, @06:05AM

    by melikamp (1886) on Saturday November 22 2014, @06:05AM (#118702) Journal
    Yet another reason to switch to icecat [gnu.org]. Defaults to DuckDuckGo, based on ESR, spoofs firefox, has essential plugins pre-installed: noscript, https everywhere, ad blocker, etc. You may want to disable LibreJS, which is supposed to help nag webmasters, but ends up nagging you.
    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday November 22 2014, @07:03AM

    by Arik (4543) on Saturday November 22 2014, @07:03AM (#118708) Journal
    What's it nagging you about?

    I use noscript and havent tried, this but reading your link it sounds interesting. A setting to 'allow all trivial scripts' sounds like it could be very useful. 
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?

    • (Score: 2) by melikamp on Saturday November 22 2014, @07:40AM

      by melikamp (1886) on Saturday November 22 2014, @07:40AM (#118717) Journal
      IMHO, the interface is annoying, and I have no hope that web masters will do anything in response to nagging. But mostly, I think the way javascript is used by both web masters and web users makes it impossible to tell which software is free. Why should I trust boilerplate if I cannot trust the source? And if I trust that the source will only serve free software, why do I need boilerplate? Hence the only effective way to deal with the "javascript trap" is authenticating and white-listing domains I trust, and that's what NoScript + HTTPS do for me. LibreJS is superfluous.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 22 2014, @08:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 22 2014, @08:09AM (#118719)

    > Yet another reason to switch to icecat.

    Seems like a stretch - because google is no longer the default search engine that is a reason to switch to another browser in which google is not the default search engine? Does icecat include google at all? Making google the default search engine on the new firefox is trivial, just pick it off the search bar menu and leave it. It is hard to imagine an easier configuration change.

    I'm all for alternate browsers, but bogus advocacy is counterproductive.

    • (Score: 1) by Wrong Turn Ahead on Sunday November 23 2014, @03:43AM

      by Wrong Turn Ahead (3650) on Sunday November 23 2014, @03:43AM (#119023)

      Firefox has been moving in a direction that isn't comfortable for some and it's rapid release cycle makes small incremental changes seem much more visible. Perhaps this specific change was the tipping point for some.

      Personally, I'm unimpressed with how all of the major browsers have evolved. Forcing god-awful, unintuitive UI changes that everybody hates. Removing features, burying settings, cramming all options into a single button, data/heath/crash/geo reporting all on by default, constant nags about updating and donating, constant breaking of add-ons, sponsored ads (tiles, on by default)... I could go on but what's the point? Mozilla is just another player in an ever-growing list of projects that no longer care about, or respect, user opinions. It's all about balance sheets now, users can fuck off.

      [rant]
          The Internet should not be an application and the browser should not be an operating system. Javascript-dependent websites suck...
      [/rant]