Mozilla, with Firefox 4 had an announcement a year ago, wherein the popular browser included Bing officially as an option in the search bar. Many might have noticed that the same came in almost a year after Mozilla started recommending users to use Bing over Google. There is more to the same news as last week, the tech world saw Bing and Mozilla teaming up with an announcement to unveil a new release, Firefox with Bing. This might not really be surprising for Google.
Noting the name given to the partnership, it might not be the most original name, but Firefox with Bing is simply Firefox with Bing set as the default home page and search engine. No other aspect has been changed, as the browser remains purely same. The functionality of the add-ons and other extensions is even same. Only th default settings are changed.
The partnership can still prove intense for Google as the unoriginality of the product’s name would not be the talk of the town. What would be is, the timing of striking the deal. Mozilla’s search deal with Google is expiring this month.
Those who have not installed Firefox, they can directly install Firefox and they would get Firefox for Bing installed. In case of those users, who already have installed Firefox, they only have to install the Bing Search for Firefox Add-on. Once done,users would notice that the same preferences are set as defaults, too.
The last deal Firefox struck with Google was in August 2008, when the duo entered into a contract to extend their partnership for the next three years. The deal basically began in November 2008, which calls for its end to be in November 2011. this means that the deal between Google and Firefox would be over this month and there has been no news about an extension or renewal. This makes the competitiveness between Google and Bing more interesting.
Google might be the king when we talk about the search engine wars and in future even would have an upper hand in terms of the browser wars. But Firefox would still hold a decent chunk in the browser wars and Bing would make the most of it.
With Google moving out of Firefox as default, Mozilla might lose a small share to its competitors, but Bing would only gain out of it as many would not seriously care about the search engine. All they want is to perform a search. The same can be noted as Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft had quoted his thought on Bing in the Web 2.0 Summit, wherein he said, “Today I’d issue you all a challenge to go take any search you want and try it out on Bing and Google! Seventy percent of the time you probably won’t care, 15 percent you’ll like us better, 15 percent you’ll like other guy better!”
Potentially, Bing is now well poised to challenge Google’s supremacy and the chunk it could bite out of the share could be huge. This default integration certainly sets Bing up to potentially receive a larger share of searches.