The break-up between Google and the Mozilla Foundation has been nothing short of logical now that Chrome is out. The official break-up has now begun, with FireFox Russia ditching Google in favor of a Russian search engine known as Yandex!
A Mozilla developer stated the following on his personal blog:
Over the past few months, we have listened to feedback, talked with our localizers, studied the trends of our Firefox Yandex builds, and reviewed the Yandex user experience. All this activity led us to the conclusion that our Russian users really wanted direct access to the Yandex search services in official Firefox RU builds. As a result, we’re planning on setting Yandex as the default search provider for the Firefox 3.1 Russian locale builds (these changes should go into the current beta for testing). This means that, upon download and launch, the Firefox Start Page for RU locale builds will use Yandex for search queries, and the search bar will default to Yandex.
From my point of view, the message is clear: the Mozilla Foundation is actively looking for new search partners. Google has little to loose by supporting Firefox until it gets booted out (after all, they get traffic in exchange); and furthermore doesn’t want to concentrate the wrath of most power users on itself by stopping to support the foundation.
The future perspective IMHO is short and sweet: localized builds will switch to other search engines slowly but surely, while Google lowers its royalty payments. The deal will then fall asleep without much further ado when all locales have found new partners…
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