Mozilla and Google Sign New Agreement for Default Search in Firefox

That's ^^^ going to have the epitaph-penners in a quandary.

Source

 

Expected Mozilla to do some sort of agreement factoring their revenues.

 

According to studies, Google spits out more betas than a pet shop.

 

That's why their shares are doing better on Wall Street than you know who's.

 

I finally took the plunge and went all the way with Bing and don't plan on looking back. I like Google Search but the downside is you have to put up with all the other Google crap, google adsense, googleanalytics, google this google that. I installed Adblock Plus and set google.com to untrusted in NoScript and was amazed at how much faster web pages load. If you watch the status bar without ABP or NS enabled, you'll see 90% of what's loading is google something or other. With ABP and NS enabled, only data from the top-level site loads.

 

Eh, while I agree that a little less Google on the web wouldn't hurt, Google scripts are the least cause of web page loading. Generally, it's Facebook, other third party ad servers and "special functions" that are completely turning the web to crap. Also, I find DuckDuckGo to be the better engine out of them both.

 

Interesting finds.

That's the hype.

 

That's because while Google is all this "we love new web standards" their search page consists of 90% obfuscated JavaScript code.

Meanwhile although Bing also uses obfuscated JavaScript code, it's more like 30%, which is impressive considering the actual page obviously is more complex than Google's page, with the background photo, tips, facts, etc.

 

Speaking of Duck Duck Go, if you want to make it your default on Firefox first add the plug-in I prefer this SSL version, then type about:config into the run bar, type browser.search.defaultenginename into the filter box & replace Google with DuckDuckGo (SSL). This is much easier to do in SeaMonkey prefs btw!

 

It also helps when you only have ~14 million shares compared to "the other guy"'s ~134 million shares.

I did this with IE but for some reason they only offer a non-SSL plugin. Right now I've got DDG as my homepage and Scroogle as my "search bar".

 

There is a much much much easier way.

Just open http://duckduckgo.com/ on Firefox, and see/click this:




Very easy:

 

To be honest, I just use the default Bing if I use IE.

 

Oh yeah, I forgot about that! I knew that there must be an easier way. I'm pretty sure you have to go into about:config as well though.

 

No need to go into about:config, when you click in Add "DuckDuckGo" (or Add "DuckDuckGo (SSL)") it will automatically become the default search engine.

You can change the default search engine simply by clicking on the names of search engines at the already shown drop-down menu.

 

You would enlighten me after I did this the hard way Thanks for the info!

 

I'm not so sure about that. I usually have Startpage as the engine foremost in the searchbar. If I type anything into the main runbar as a search query, rather than an actual World Wide Web address, it uses DDG. I can click on any of the engines in the secondary search bar but DDG is still the runbar default.

 

I've never used it. How does it compare with Ixquick in your opinion?

 

You weren't asking me, but the reason I favor Duck is because there are no distracting "features" like page preview in the search results and other nonsense. Also, I've found search results to be more accurate/relevant with Duck. There are far less spam links like a single forum post that might mention the term you're looking for in a single sentence, content farms, paid for top spot results and that sort of thing.

 

Oh I understand. Searching in the address bar is a different matter. To change the default search engine there you really need to dig into about:config.

I don't use any of them, I use google. What I know is that DDG results are enhanced by Yahoo/Bing and Ixquick results are enhanced by Google.

 

@dw426, guest: Thanks to both of you. I'll try it out.

 

No problem. I never thought about Duck being powered by Bing, explains the more relevant results. I do however like the simplicity of Duck over Bing. Either one is better than the mess Google has turned into, imho.

 

It's really not that difficult, after all I managed it.

 

Mozilla ditches Bing, renews search deal with Google

 

Ditches Bing? It never went with Bing in the first place lol. Unless they mean they removed the special Bing version which I doubt (can't read that page).

Hopefully by the time Windows 8 is out it's improved, then I'll leave it as my search box search, and use SSL DDG as my homepage. It's nice to have 2 easily accessible search services.

 

DuckDuckGo is growing ... apparently