[feelin_googley]

"Mozilla ditched Yahoo recently however in favor of Google, two years before the five year contract would be up for renewal. The terms of the new deal with Google have not been revealed yet, and it remains to be seen whether this new deal will give Mozilla's revenue another boost in 2017."

Apparently Firefox 57 when it is installed tries to switch the users default search engine to Google.

Whether it asks for user permission to do so, I am not sure.

Do the terms of the deal actually require them to do this?

[callahad]

I'm not privy to the search deal, but my understanding is that this is driven by our internal user research and metrics, which show that a significant number of users have a search engine other than what they prefer or expect. In these cases, users usually choose to directly navigate to their preferred search engine to search, instead of using Firefox access points. That’s a poor user experience, so our focus here is on ensuring users have the defaults they want.

The decision tree is roughly:

1. If the custom engine is one of our default options, keep it.

2. If the custom engine was set by an add-on, keep it.

3. If the custom engine uses HTTPS, prompt the user to actively choose by opening about:searchreset, and do not prompt again after the user has made a choice.

4. If the custom engine uses insecure HTTP, silently reset to the default.

You can open about:searchreset yourself to see what the prompt looks like.

Code at https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/a928be5dacc3b544...

[nialv7]

There's another firefox prompt which also annoys me.

Firefox sometimes asks me if I want to do a factory reset, clear all my settings and add-ons, "to make the browser faster".

I believe most users will find this question absurd. And Mozilla give it a pretty baity name, too. "Refresh Firefox". What if someone clicks Yes by mistake?

[adsche]

Re 3.: I think that's a terrible promtp. The prompt says, my settings might be outdated and I should switch back to Google as a search engine. What's the reasoning here? Why is implied that the settings are outdated if I use a custom search engine? No other settings are checked/affected by this prompt, so why frame it as a settings issue at all?

Re 4.: Why silently, why not a prompt here?

[NiceGuy_Ty]

Using an HTTP based search engine should be explicitly opt-in, imo. Moving it to https by default seems like the right choice for non-technical users.

[staktrace]

It should only try to switch the user's default search engine if the user hasn't explicitly set a default search engine. You can verify this by install a Firefox 56 build from the ftp archive, explicitly changing the default search engine, and then letting it update to Firefox 57.

[Drdrdrq]

Not true - I had to explicitly remove Google (again) and set StartPage as default on all my installations. I think it happened with 57.0.1 upgrade though.

[staktrace]

Hm, if that's the case, then it's a bug. If you could file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org it would be much appreciated. Even though it already happened we can try and ensure it doesn't happen again.

[catwell]

Apparently it is a bug. It works for search engines shipped with Firefox (such as DuckSuckGo) but not for others (such as StartPage of Qwant). See https://twitter.com/gchampeau/status/938757076213518336

[feelin_googley]

It sounds like Mozilla just wants to keep users confined to a pre-approved list of search engines. Are these also business partners with Mozilla, like Google?

Here are some other HTTPS-enabled search engines to test. If I am not mistaken all have been mentioned on HN in the past.

    https://wiby.me 
    https://gigablast.com
    https://mojeek.com
    https://unbubble.eu
    https://ecosia.org
    https://searx.me
    https://symbolhound.com
    https://findx.com

[kazagistar]

It looks like a mistake, not malice.

[bigbugbag]

I have a hard time believing this kind of happy coincidence benefiting their commercial partner could be a bug, it really looks like an intended feature.

[bigbugbag]

What do you mean much appreciated ? My experience with bugzilla is that it is a place where users are ignored and told they are not part of a large enough portion of the user base to be significant for using linux, or for using alsa or for needing an option to keep the previous interface.

I do not dare going close to mozilla's bugzilla, it has been a waste of my time almost every time and taking abuse and frustration is not exactly an enjoyable experience.

But hey this does not really matter anymore as after over 15 years of supporting mozilla I have had enough of its utter nonsense and have now left firefox with the firm intent to never return and have stopped supporting anything mozilla while actively hoping it will fail and disappear, the sooner, the better.

Way too much disdain for the people using firefox, too much discrepancy between the marketing and the actual thing. Alienating long time supporter one by one is probably not the smartest strategy but hey what do I know, mozilla is making hundred more millions with a fraction of the past user base so they're probably successful by their own metrics.

[roblabla]

I have no idea where you get all that. I've done a few reports on bugzilla, bugs in firefox on ArchLinux (so linux, and not a standardized setup). They've all been answered, and most have been fixed.

Sometimes, I've been told the setup I was using wasn't supported, but they'd accept a patch if I was willing to invest some effort in it. I did once, and the patch was indeed accepted.

Obviously, Mozilla cannot support every obscure platform, but then again neither does Chrome. I don't think your expectation match reality if you think that's the case.

[bigbugbag]

I get that from using bugzilla from time to time since around 2005 maybe. Last time and one of the worst was the ALSA debacle. IIRC first time was about integration in KDE.

To recap the ALSA one, mozilla pretended ALSA had shortcomings it actually does not have (some things about edge cases of netflix and 5.1 audio or something) and it turned out it was Mozilla implementation that was so bad and pretty much abandone that no one at mozilla wanted to work on it. It was taunted at people complaining that for ALSA to stay they should do it themselves or find someone to do it, until someone came forward and offered to do it and suddenly it was too late so it was not happening. The other reason invoked was that a very little number of people did not have libpulse installed which it turned out was false (because most distro disabled mozilla's spying) and irrelevant (libpulse is often pulled as a dependency on ALSA only system). So suddenly it was the fault of distro packagers and people caring about their privacy had it coming because they took the extra step of disabling telemetry (which is not supposed to be enable on release channel anyways).

I supposed those bug reports are still somewhere in bugzilla, if you wanna look for them. The KDE integration one is one of the longstanding open ones, and openSUSE provided a patch for better KDE integration at some point but it was refused for some reason. you can find it on AUR https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-kde-opensuse/

Even a simple one related to the ALSA debacle was ignored, see they forgot to mention dropping ALSA in the release notes somehow they overlooked this "detail" but they thought to include a warning message with a link to an URL that happen to be broken. A bug report was filed to report this along with the correct URL but the fix that should have taken about a minute to implement had not seen the light of day after two weeks and AFAIK did not happen at all.

I sincerely doubt KDE, debian, arch, ALSA are obscure platforms, and turns out chromium supports alsa (IINM firefox is the only linux browser with a hard dependency on pulseaudio).

To be honest with time I have learned not to expect better of Mozilla or more like to expect mozilla to not deliver on its marketing promises and to dismiss user feedback.

/edit

here's the recent iteration of the KDE integration bug, this one has been opened for 16 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=140751

here's the main one for dropping ALSA and making pulseaudio a hard dependency, it got locked and discussion continued on google groups somewhere: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247056 there are other with several duplicates such as: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661

I can't find the main broken URL one with the duplicates, but it seems this one is about the same issue and had been marked as solved (Only took 3 months to fix a broken URL which was the only was to get details on why the browser suddenly stopped playing sound): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345439

To my knowledge there are many other examples in bugzilla in the last 10 years, maybe I've been unlucky and found myself in the worst of bugzilla making my experience not representative of the actual thing, but from what I gathered around on mozillazine, HN, distro forums and some other places my experience is not out of touch with what others have to say about theirs.

[jcranmer]

Judging from your comment, it sounds like the only bugs you filed are "YOU CHANGED THIS AND BROKE ME CHANGE THIS BACK NOW" kind of bugs, and probably for things that were consciously and intentionally done. That's not going to go anywhere because, quite frankly, they're not bugs, and most of the bug filers/commenters are unwilling to do anything constructive, like offer to maintain something.

My experience has been, rather, that Mozilla has had one of the most fantastically responsive bug filing systems. Actually getting bugs fixed in a timely manner is a different question, but that's independent of bug tracking systems.

[bigbugbag]

Well maybe you should not judge from comments then.

Reporting bugs and HN discussion is obviously not the same, at all. I know how to make bug reports and have not had bad experience like those on mozilla's bugzilla anywhere else, well maybe on gnome bugzilla and occasionally here and there because over 20 years of reporting bugs you are deemed to have the occasional bad experience.

I'm not saying your experience was bad or even close mine, I'm only talking for myself here. Maybe I have been impacted with some of the most controversial bugs and you've not, maybe I'm actually more in a niche segment of the user base than you are.

Anyways thanks for judging and misjudging my person based on assumption, it always nice to be targeted by passive aggressive online message from a random stranger.

The fun part in your comment is that constructive minded people do not expect or ask of bug reporters to offer to maintain something for they understand that reporting bugs is actually very constructive in itself, a helpful and much needed activity. Instead of antagonizing bug reporters try working with them, as "we're both in this working together to improve something for everyone". Assume good faith instead of malice and to understand that this an actual person reporting the bug and cut the patronizing, it will help. If you do not feel capable of doing that, just say nothing it will be more constructive.

[ChuckMcM]

Maybe? It certainly continues to raise the cost to Google for the search traffic provided by Firefox. When Firefox switched to Firefox it boosted Yahoo!'s organic share of search [1], which if it held up at the 2% speculated would represent about (16.8B * 2%) 336M searches in Feb '17 [2] attributable to the Mozilla deal. One would need to work backward from the revenue per thousand (RPM) to see what sort of ROI that gave Yahoo!.

The story at the time was that Google walked away from the deal when Mozilla wanted more than they thought their traffic was worth, and now Google is back 2 years before the contract expires makes me wonder if Mozilla was more accurate in the relative value of their ability to generate search traffic. So now I'm curious to see how much Google's traffic acquisition costs have gone up (TAC) with this switch.

[1] https://www.digitalreachagency.com/blog/firefox-deal-boosts-...

[2] https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases...

[greglindahl]

My handwave for the previous Google deal was that Mozilla was getting paid about 10% of the money Google made from Firefox searches. There's a lot of money there.

[zerr]

How that amount is calculated and how transparent it is (to Mozilla or similar partners)?

[dblohm7]

Google did not walk away from Mozilla in 2014. Mozilla walked away from Google.

[patall]

It certainly did not ask for me and just switched from startpage to Google. Also auto-installed the update (against my will) after I had voted to wait a few times, though that might have been autoupdate as it was on my work computer (have heard from others that it was not which I also suspect but I am too lazy to check). Mozilla is certainly losing trust with that, if it weren't for the lack of good alternatives...

[shostack]

The auto update happened to me too and broke all my good extensions including All In One Gestures and NoScript.

How do you disable the auto update? For now I've manually installed an older compatible version.

[bigbugbag]

There is a good alternative called waterfox (yup the name says it all) and of the recent update disabled the dreaded auto update thing trying actively to get rid of your legacy extensions.

https://waterfoxproject.org/

[smichel17]

On my machine it stayed with ddg. shrug

[TheGrassyKnoll]

Me too.

[cryptoz]

A few years ago when Mozilla switched from Google to Yahoo, they updated Firefox on my Mac and changed my default search from Google to Yahoo. It was not a new installation, it was an upgrade, and I was not asked about the switch.

[staktrace]

If you don't change the default search engine, then updates to the default search engine will affect you. If you explicitly change the default, then the updates should leave your choice intact.

[Drdrdrq]

As commented elsewhere: not true. I had to change settings (back) on quite a few accounts, so I'm certain of it. And yes, I did have StartPage as default.

[staktrace]

I was slightly off; see callahad's description of the algorithm elsewhere in the thread for a better description of what happens.

[Nomentatus]

But you've said what s/he said - you liked the default, but the default changed. That's what you both agree on. Had you not remained on the default search engine, your move would have been retained. This leaves the question of whether a past change first away from the default and then back would have been counted as a choice to be retained or as merely the default.

[mozillanotnice]

I had another provider explicitly set default search engine, but was asked if it could switch to Google during the Ubuntu update to 57.

Annoying.

[paulryanrogers]

Ubuntu used to have their own bundled add-on which may have affected those defaults

[bigbugbag]

What kind of convoluted reasoning is behind this antifeature ? Please do not alter or change user space. Please consider how this kind of thing impacts the life of the many people who struggle with computers. Understand that this entails on what's left of trust one could still have with mozilla.

Or don't as I'm personally not affected and already have grown a deep mistrust for mozilla.

[jacksmith21006]

Think this is why Firefox took a dip in market share when they change search without asking.

[confounded]

It did for me.

[nine_k]

It did ask me, and only once, when I updated to 57.01 or something.

[deckarep]

In 2017 who’s still using Yahoo anyway for their search engine?

[neonhomer]

I was going to ask the same thing. But also why are people still using Google? I've been using DuckDuckGo for years and only use Google when I'm forced to (like in Chrome on iOS).

[bigbugbag]

Because the vast majority of users never change the default. Among the rest a significant part has an habit and it is harder to unlearn something than learn something new.

[khedoros1]

Because fairly frequently, I'll search for something on DDG, not find what I was expecting, and try on Google as a backup. And because in many people's minds, Google is search.

[forapurpose]

I thought the same thing, then I realized there was a significant selection bias: I was only looking at events where half the hypothesis (DDG fails & Google succeeds) is true. For example, how does DDG perform when Google fails?

[khedoros1]

That's true, but I wasn't thinking in that direction. I was just trying to answer "why are people still using Google?".

But honestly, if Google doesn't have it (down below whichever ad-driven first results I have to skip), it's a good bet that I'm not going to find it on other search engines either, unless some specific site indexes its own content better than the search engines do (archive.org comes to mind, for some things).

Of course, this is all colored by my search style and the topics I'm usually looking for information on.

[jacksmith21006]

If Google fails doubt it will be found on other choices. I will post something on a smaller site and Google will pick it up while the other search engines will not. So for me just easy choice is to use Google.

[thomastjeffery]

Put a !g in the front of your search.

DuckDuckGo is awesome.

[khedoros1]

Suppose I might as well configure my browser to use that pattern, instead of going directly to Google search, too. That would make it a bit more convenient to remember.

[thomastjeffery]

!g google

!gi google images

!define the free dictionary

!r reddit

There are a lot more, and I find them quite useful.

[neonhomer]

The one I use all the time is !m for Google Maps.

[neonhomer]

Can you give an example? I've seen this comment before but never have an issue with DDG.

[flavor8]

DDG's fine for some kinds of searches, but for search involving you as context (which can be useful) it is obviously not useful.

[recursive]

Because it works better.

[2bitencryption]

asking why people "still use Google" is like asking why people "still drink water".

[bigleagueposter]

I support google because they are enemies of microsoft/apple/facebook.

[bigbugbag]

You are deeply mistaken if you really think those are enemies.

First apple is a hardware vendor of overpriced gadgets, totally unrelated to google market which is an advertising network.

Second the ship has long sailed on the feud between Google and Facebook, they now have ceased fighting and are each back on focusing on their own thing.

Do you have a recent example of google fighting microsoft ? heck even apple was friend with microsoft behind the scene, the fight was just for show. Remember how bill gates gave money to help apple stay afloat ?

[jacksmith21006]

Two mobile platforms Android and iOS and you think Google does not compete against Apple?

Tell that to Tim Cooks high school

https://9to5google.com/2016/06/20/chromebooks-taking-over-ma... At Apple CEO Tim Cook's old high school, they are selling their ...

[bigleagueposter]

Google is moving stuff from the Microsoft controlled desktop to the browser.

[bigbugbag]

What are you referring to ?

google docs happened a while ago and it's been some time since microsoft has started moving its office suite to the cloud with office365.

Actually microsoft has been moving from the desktop to cloud for a few years now.

[bigbugbag]

You're missing the point, yahoo needed to be default engine in Firefox to help with selling itself at a certain price tag, that's about it.