Chris Beard, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, announced in his blog Wednesday, 11 November 2014, that they were ending their 10-year relationship with Google. As of December, they begin a five-year "strategic partnership" with Yahoo.
For those wondering why the switch, The Verge has an interesting take on it:
In tech, little things can have big consequences — in this case, a tiny search bar. Last night, Firefox made a surprising announcement: after 10 years with Google as its default search engine, it would be handing the tiny search bar over to Yahoo. On the face of it, it's a strange move. If you're looking for almost anything on the internet, Google is a much better way to find it than Yahoo is. But that small search bar isn't just a feature, it's a business. And it’s a business that reveals how Mozilla and Google could increasingly be at odds with each other.
[We touched on this in a recent story about Firefox's expanding search options, but this aspect seems significant enough to merit specific attention. -LaminatorX]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 22 2014, @09:25PM
This is the same drain that GNOME went down thanks to GNOME 3, and it's the drain that Debian is now swirling toward.
I think it does matter, even if you don't use Firefox, because whatever major open source projects you hold dear could be following them next.
Awareness must be raised about the danger that hipsters and their ilk pose to software development projects.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday November 22 2014, @09:42PM
Believe me I am very aware of the danger. The question is, how do we banish them to another planet?
(Score: 3, Funny) by useless on Sunday November 23 2014, @12:57AM
Then there was a "Catch and Release" [gothamist.com] type program. The problem was they forgot to do the "Release" part outside the city, and just got overrun with them.
Maybe we can work with the Mars One [mars-one.com] project to fill the rockets with PBR, MacBooks, and Rails manuals.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Monday November 24 2014, @03:11PM
It also matters because at this time, while Firefox may be taking a bit of a nosedive, there's not really a serious browser left on the market worth picking. You can have Google's marketpla....err, browser (nevermind the terribly limited extension support by comparison), Apple's security nightmare, or...dear god, IE is actually being taken seriously again these days. Or Opera, I guess, with the other dozen or so users.
At least Debian didn't hold the kind of monopoly on sanity for power users Firefox has held for over a decade now, problems and all. This is not a good state of affairs for the web.