SAN FRANCISCO: After a lucrative, 10-year relationship, Mozilla is breaking up with Google and switching to Yahoo as the default search provider for its popular Firefox web browser.
Mozilla’s partnership with Google had been rocky for years, so its end was not entirely unexpected.
Google is the United States’ favourite search provider, with about two-thirds of the market, according to comScore, but it also created and actively promotes its own web browser, Chrome.
Mozilla, meanwhile, has sought to create its own mobile phone software, competing with Google’s Android, and has tried to distinguish itself from rivals by committing to customer privacy technologies that are opposed by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and just about every other major website that sells advertising.
Yahoo’s decision to swoop in is surprisingly aggressive, underscoring that Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, still believes in search as a promising line of business.
“This is the most significant partnership for Yahoo in five years and we’re so proud that Mozilla has chosen us as their long-term partner in search,” said Mayer, a former Google executive.
Mozilla’s chief executive, Chris Beard, said Mozilla users search the web more than 100 billion times a year. If Yahoo gets a major chunk of that volume, it will add significantly to the company’s revenue.
To get the deal, Yahoo had to eat crow on the “do not track” technology promoted by Mozilla that allows consumers to flip a switch to request that websites they visit refrain from tracking their personal data.
In April, Yahoo said it was abandoning support for the anti-tracking technology because there was no industry agreement on using it and Yahoo wanted to track users to provide more personalised services and ads.
Under the new deal with Mozilla, Yahoo has agreed to once again honour do-not-track signals sent by Firefox users. But Yahoo will continue to ignore do-not-track requests if they are sent out by users of other browsers, which offer a similar beacon. NYT