Firefox drops Google for Yandex in Russia

Sun 11 January 2009 17:33, Bas van den Beld

After the introduction of Chrome, just after the newest Firefox-Google deal was sealed, there was a lot of question on what would happen to the deal. So far Firefox and Chrome both live happily next to each other.

Now in Russia however for the first time ever Google is not the default Firefox search engine anymore. Firefox replaced Google with Yandex, the most popular search engine in Russia.

On his blog Mozilla General Counsel Harvey Anderson states:

_{"In October, we asked for feedback on creating a deeper partnership with Yandex, one in which we would make Yandex search features the default in our Firefox Russian language builds. 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."}

Google will not be amused by the change. The Russian market is big and Google is trying to gain ground but will see this as a major setback.

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Comments (1)

- Dennis Sievers
- [website]
Well, why not :) everybody has to fight for his own position, so does Firefox. If Yandex has more potential to generate market share or revenue, then go for it! Chrome definitely will be a strong competitor for Firefox, so they should do whatever they can to protect themselves.

I think its a good choice. Google should not get things done that easy all the time.

Zo 11 jan 2009, 21:40

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