14 DAY TRIAL // Pale Moon's lead developer announced yesterday that the browser would remove any trace of Google Search following Google's decision not to reward the project for the search traffic the browser is sending their way.
First signs that something was wrong in the Pale Moon - Google collaboration came on August 8, when Moonchild, the Pale Moon project's founder, published an announcement that included, among other things, the following paragraph:
“ As you may know, the search engine traffic on that start page is a big portion of what gives me the income to make Pale Moon work at no cost to its users. Unfortunately Google has been pretty much cutting me off with claiming it is 'invalid traffic' and that it would be a policy violation just because the browser is downloadable software - this is nonsense, because the web page the search traffic comes from is a normal, public web page like we've run since day one, and search traffic from the search bar or about:home pages is not monetized at all through Google's program (meaning 100% of that revenue goes to Google if used). With Google trying to pull a 'we'll take your traffic but won't pay for it' on me (still pending a clear answer from them), it's high time to switch this over to our more reliable search partner DuckDuckGo. ”
Following this announcement, the Pale Moon browser, a fork of the Firefox browser but with a focus on privacy and still supporting the XUL interface, released an update.This update switched from using Google Search to DuckDuckGo as the default search provider across the whole browser.
Three days later, as the Google reply Moonchild mentioned came in, things appeared to have taken a turn for the worse.
“ Despite the general popularity of Google Search as an option in Pale Moon, we have been forced to make a hard decision to remove Google Search completely from anything in Pale Moon. As a follow-up to the problems indicated in our previous announcement, Google's "Ad Traffic Quality Team" has decided to interpret their policies that are geared to preventing toolbars and external programs from changing user settings for home pages and similar as "you may not have a Google Search box on the default home page", basically trying to determine for us what our out-of-the-box-experience (OOBE) should be. In lieu of giving Google control over our design choices, we are removing Google Search as an option entirely, both from the start page and from within the browser. ”
Moonchild is now working on a Pale Moon version that will remove Google Search completely from its browser.Google's decision does not make sense
The entire situation is a little ironic and moronic at the same time since Google's ad policy is aimed to prevent abusive behavior from plugins and toolbars that hijack the user's browsing experience by inserting the Google search box in other pages or products.
Clearly, the Pale Moon is not a malicious product and is not being forced upon users in any other way. A developer should have the ability to decide the default settings in their own product, and take advantage of Google's search revenue making system at the same time.
Furthermore, Pale Moon is based on Firefox, a browser that was kept alive all these years thanks to its Google Search integration.
Pale Moon users who still want to use Google for their searches from Pale Moon need to visit the google.com service, install a browser plugin, or use DuckDuckGo (new default search provider) by adding "!g" to all searches.
Softpedia has reached out for comment to Google. We'll update the article with any relevant information we receive from the company, if made available.