Hey Firefox - Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine | Hacker News Reader

Hey Firefox - Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine

searchengineland.com

17 pointsjohns42 comments

The main issue with IE using MSN (or whatever it's called now) as their default home page or search engine is not a moral issue, it is an antitrust issue. Microsoft's IE has a monopoly (at least until recently and maybe still), and they are leveraging the browser monopoly to give them an advantage in another industry (Search).

Mozilla has no monopoly, and thus their use of (a sponsored) Google search box is not anticompetitive.

And one more thing.... You're free to create a fork of Firefox that uses Yahoo by default or whatever your heart desires.

Just don't call it Firefox. Haha

And if you don't like IE or windows, go write your own IE and/or windows.

See? This sort of logic cuts both ways.

Not exactly. Creating a fork is much different from writing one's own Firefox- it's just copying code and changing the default browser bit, not writing an entire web browser that's exactly the same.

Thank You ... seriously, it's promising to see people in this discussion who actually can see beyond the Google/Firefox fog.

legal != moral

"Let the user make the initial search choice" -- Yes, I love install steps that abstractly please software theorists and confuse or irritate all others.

Yeah really, computers are MAINSTREAM. That means you have to sacrifice a lot to compensate for the large amount of casual/new users.

My dad knew that the blue E is internet and Google helps you find web pages. He's been using a computer for a while now and doesn't care what a browser or a search engine is.

But he does listen to me when I tell him Google + Firefox are the best.

Providing a choice does not create confusion if the interface is designed correctly.

Yes it does. You'd be shocked at how fast I've seen some people complain that IE was easier when they get the import favorites dialog during FF installation. They don't even bother to read it and see if it's easy, they just see it requires work and want to go back to whatever they were using before.

I think it's easy to justify only including the top two search engines, or at least the search engines with >10% market share (1), for the sake of keeping the choices uncluttered.

By this article's logic, should they also include barnesandnoble.com, since they include amazon, and ubid.com since they include ebay?

1. http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156451

Ever consider that te FF default search choice contributes to those nifty Neilson ratings?

Since it funds the development of FireFox, I don't really care. I wasn't going to use Live.com anyway.

pick their own default

Not possible.

I'm going to have to say I agree with the author, Mozilla should take the moral high ground here and not default to Google but ask the user during install or the first time they use the search box.

Not including Live.com seems somewhat petty on their part (or greedy if they have deals with Y! too)

Mozilla make tens of millions of dollars out of that Google search box every year. That's some expensive moral high ground you're asking for there!

That's why it's called "moral high ground" instead of "most profitable way to sell out".

Philosophical question: would it be moral for Mozilla to cancel that deal and then have to lay off half of their staff?

Any organization that gets revenues from some illicit practice would presumably have to fire people if they stopped. So if preserving jobs is sufficient reason to keep doing something, no organization should ever stop doing something bad, as long as it remains profitable.

Yeah, it'd be moral to correct for mistakes like that, but very unfortunate for the employees. I have very close friends who work at Mozilla. I wouldn't wish that on them at all. Still, they came to Mozilla because of its integrity and role. If it was explained to them that Mozilla can only remain independent of corporate influence by re-evaluating their stance on issues like this, I think the employees would understand and many of them (hacker-types) would continue working on the open source projects (as before) when they could.

Difficult situation, though, no doubt.

Look, Google can easily say they like Mozilla, want to fund it with a $100 million per year and that they want to back their stated goal of protecting user choice by saying they do NOT want to be the default but rather one of several choices that a user actively selects from. Mozilla wins, Google wins, users win. But bottom line, if Google is for choice in IE, then it should be for choice everywhere.

Great comment, except Google and Mozilla are too busy counting their millions to care.

Maybe MSFT hasn't ponied up the same $$$ as Google and Yahoo to appear in Firefox?

I don't think a nonprofit that battles MSFT should have to give them free valuable promotional space, and conversely MSFT may not want to fund a competitor.

DenisM I have to say I think you and I are alone on this.

The chorus of "shhh Mozilla is making millions on this" is drumming out logical debate.

Compared to the reinvigoration of browser competition and standards-compliance that the Mozilla project has achieved, this issue is a minor quibble. You can add Microsoft and many others with a few clicks.

Someone has got to be the default, and selling preferential placement means this project, an important counterbalance to MSFT, gets around 1/1000th the revenue of MSFT.

Let MSFT outbid Google for the top spot if they want. MSFT doesn't need anyone's charity.

When a people values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. -- Dwight D Eisenhower's, inaugural address, Tue 20 Jan 1953.

I'm not sure how much overlap there is between people who use live.com and people who use Mozilla's Firefox. I'd assume that people who use live.com use internet explorer because they apparently have some sort of preference to Microsoft products. But, since Google is the most popular search engine on the internet, the vice-versa isn't true, meaning that an IE user wont automatically prefer live.com. Logically speaking, it would be a bad product that doesn't use the most popular search engine as their default configuration. I'd have more issue with this if Firefox had chosen Yahoo! over Google.