Lorie Wimble
As some of you guys might have heard, Mozilla recently entered into a partnership with Yahoo in which it will see Yahoo become the new default search engine for the browser. However it seems that Mozilla doesn’t want to cut users off completely from other search engines that they might be more familiar with, such as Google or Bing. The default search engine will be Yahoo, but at the same time for those who want to try their luck using Google or Bing will just need to type in their query and click either the Google or Bing button.
Mozilla today unveiled some of the new search features coming to Firefox. The company says the new additions are “coming soon to a Firefox near you” but didn’t give a more specific timeline. The news comes less than a week after Mozilla struck a deal with Yahoo to replace Google as the default search engine in its browser for U.S. users. At the time, the company said a new search experience was coming in December, so we’re betting the search revamp will come with the release of Firefox 34, which is currently in beta. In the future release, when you type a search term into the Firefox search box, you will get a list of reorganized search suggestions from the default search provider. Better yet, a new array of buttons below these suggestions will let you pick which search engine you want to send the query to. Firefox is the only major browser that still offers a search bar separate from the address bar. This plays in nicely into Mozilla’s recent decision to push search as a big part of the browser that users can customize.
Seems to me there is a privacy issue with the new search box. Say you are silly enough to leave the default search provider set as Yahoo, Bing, Google or any other provider that sees you as the product, as soon as you start typing into the box, your search terms are sent off to the default provider, so that they can generate “suggestions”, even if you finally select a different provider using the buttons provided.
My advice would be to set your default provider to something like DuckDuckGo, that doesn’t track you, and, just to be on the safe side, switch-off search suggestions in case Mozilla send your search terms off to Yahoo anyway.
I will be looking for an addon to replace the default search box now.