14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla’s Firefox Quantum launched last week with a series of substantial improvements, including a change that many might not notice at first, but which becomes more obvious as they use the browser.
Yahoo has been replaced as the default search engine with Google, as Mozilla has apparently terminated the deal prematurely in an attempt to provide the best experience to users.
Little has been said on the reasons why Mozilla decided to give up on its partnership with Yahoo, but it’s not hard to speculate, especially given the sale of the company to Verizon and the hacking sagas that made the news recently, even though they’re not necessarily linked to search.
The partnership between Mozilla and Yahoo was signed in 2014 and was supposed to be in place for 5 years, and even though the browser maker stepped away earlier, it’s still entitled to annual payments of up to $375 million according to the terms of the deal revealed by Recode.
Google also scoring big
At first glance, it’s a double-win move for Mozilla, and the company says it’s still willing to work with Yahoo’s parent company in any other industry than search.
“We exercised our contractual right to terminate our agreement with Yahoo! based on a number of factors including doing what’s best for our brand, our effort to provide quality web search, and the broader content experience for our users. We believe there are opportunities to work with Oath and Verizon outside of search,” Mozilla’s chief business and legal officer, Denelle Dixon, was quoted as saying.
At the same time, Mozilla returning to its search engine is a big victory for Google, as its search engine is now powering the world’s two most-popular browsers, namely its own Chrome and Firefox.
Also, the search engine has also replaced Microsoft’s Bing to provide search capabilities to Apple’s Siri and Spotlight, thus becoming the default option on the world’s second most widely used mobile platform.
