Yahoo tells visitors that they should “upgrade to Firefox”

Yahoo! has started urging visitors to its homepage to “upgrade to the new Firefox” – even when they aren’t using the Mozilla browser in the first place. The message, along with a Firefox logo, has begun appearing for some users in the purple band along the top of Yahoo!‘s portal pages. It’s displayed when the visitor is using an outdated version of Firefox, but it also shows up for any versions of rival browsers, such as Chrome or Internet Explorer.

If you’re visiting any Yahoo property today, chances are you’ll see an “Upgrade to the new Firefox” link in the top-right corner of your browser window. The prompt also appears if you’re using Internet Explorer, Opera and even the new Yandex browser. However, the prompt is missing from Safari, which will surely prompt a new round of speculation about Apple’s rumored switch to Yahoo as its default search engine. Given that Firefox now uses Yahoo as its default search engine, this move doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Yahoo clearly wants as many people as possible to use Firefox — and with it its search engine (which is powered by Microsoft Bing).