Firefox just dumped Google for Yahoo.
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After celebrating its 10 year anniversary earlier this month, Mozilla flaunted new initiatives to further its vision of democratising the web, throwing around strong words such as choice, opportunity and independence. The software giant has just announced a partnership that will integrate Yahoo Search as its default search engine for its Firefox web browser.
This move essentially concludes a 10-year deal between Google and Firefox and initiates a five-year partnership with Yahoo.
Starting December 2014, Yahoo Search will become the default search engine for Firefox users in the US only — one of the world’s largest internet populations along with China and India. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines will stay on board as alternatives.
Whether via browser or search, according to StatCounter, Google is by far the most popular commercial data cruncher out there. While this statement should come as no surprise to anyone, the numbers are quite staggering.
Chrome boasts 47% usage, which is just shy of half of the internet’s population across desktops, tablets and smartphones. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is seeing a considerable drop from nearly 30% to 19% in just 12 months. While Firefox is currently being used by about 17% of the world’s population.
Google Search crunches the data of over 90% of the world’s online curiosity. Yahoo and Bing huddle along far behind at 3.8% and 4.4% respectively. China’s popular search engine Baidu corners around 0.5% of the world’s search traffic.
These numbers might start to change given this new partnership.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer explains that this is the “most significant partnership for Yahoo in five years” and that she hopes to work more closely with Mozilla:
At Yahoo, we believe deeply in search – it’s an area of investment, opportunity and growth for us. This partnership helps to expand our reach in search and also gives us an opportunity to work closely with Mozilla to find ways to innovate more broadly in search, communications, and digital content.
Chris Beard, Mozilla CEO says: “Our new search strategy doubles down on our commitment to make Firefox a browser for everyone, with more choice and opportunity for innovation.”
