Weekend Breakup: Firefox Leaves Google for Yandex
Posted by jonathan at 6:17pm EST on 01/10/2009
Most recently, Firefox, after having been in bed with Google for quite some time, is shopping around for a new [Russian] partner. According to Mozilla’s bug tracking system Bugzilla, there is a bug request to change the default search partner from Google to Yandex.
This is all despite Mozilla and Google having a long-standing partnership already created.
“Another important element is the financial resources Mozilla enjoys. We’ve just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income. We’re also learning more all the time about how to use Mozilla’s financial resources to help contributors through infrastructure, new programs, and new types of support from employees.”
So despite having renewed the contract for an additional three years, Mozilla still felt it was alright to go ahead and change the default search engine. I don’t say “break the contract” because I’m not completely clear on what the contract entails, but I can only imagine that this change breaches the contract in some way.
This very well could be a blow from Mozilla to Google due to the release of Google Chrome. When Google Chrome was released, it was still a bit shocking to Mozilla and probably started second-guessing their extended partnership.
The extended partnership Google definitely secures revenue for the following years, but Mozilla still doesn’t seem to be happy with the current situation.
What’s next? Firefox France? Firefox Germany?
Incoming search terms:
- google and mozilla partnership
- google firefox breakup
- how to change yandex firefox
- yandex firefox partnership
Joe Casabona
Jan 10th, 2009
That’s pretty ridiculous. First of all, Yandex doesn’t seem like a very good search engine (example: a search for Fox News doesn’t even list foxnews.com on the first page), and Google isn’t really benefiting from being the featured search in Firefox, is it? It seems like a pretty petty move to me.
Jonathan Dingman
Jan 10th, 2009
Joe,
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/20/mozilla_2007_financials/
Mozilla generated $67 million in revenue from that little Google search box.
And you wouldn’t get great results for a few reasons. First, you’re searching using English terms, while it’s it a Russian search engine. Second, it’s most likely using geo-targeting, so again, the search results wouldn’t return the same.
If you were to search in Russian, you may see more relevant results. But since I’m not Russian and cannot speak Russian, I cannot interpret the quality of the results first-hand.