Google just became the default search provider in Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, as it has dropped Yahoo as its default search engine provider ending its 3-year partnership with it.
The change in the default US search provider came as Mozilla launched Firefox Quantum, version 57, a speedier and lighter browser on account of a noteworthy redesign of the rendering engine, new multi-core support, and more efficient handling of tabs.
In 2014, Mozilla struck a deal with Yahoo to make it the default search engine provider for users in the U.S., with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and others as options. When Mozilla announced the Yahoo deal in 2014, it said this was a five-year deal. Those five years are obviously not up yet and now, it has announced termination of this deal.
“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 Chief Business and Legal Officer Denelle Dixon said in a statement.
“As part of our focus on user experience and performance in Firefox Quantum, Google will also become our new default search provider in the United States, Canada, Hong Kong and Taiwan. With over 60 search providers pre-installed as defaults or secondary options across more than 90 language versions, Firefox has more choice in search providers than any other browser.”
Firefox users can at manually change their default search engine back to Yahoo if they wish, or any of the browser’s 60 built-in search engines for that matter. Firefox offers the major selection of built-in search engines compared to any other browser.
Certain regions will trait a different default search engine, such as Yandex in Russia, Turkey, Belarus and Kazakhstan; and Baidu in China. The rest of the world will have Google as the default search engine in Firefox. Firefox Quantum is available now for desktop operating systems.
