Lucid changes to Firefox default search provider

Rick Spencer rick.spencer at canonical.com
Tue Jan 26 20:03:01 GMT 2010


All -

I am writing to apprise you of two small but important changes coming to
Firefox in Lucid.  I have asked the desktop team to start preparing
these changes to make them available in Lucid as soon as reasonably
possible. Probably on the order of weeks.

Change #1
In Lucid, the default home page will respect the search provider
settings that you have set in the "Chrome". (The "Chrome" is Mozilla's
term for the little search box to the upper right, reachable by
control-K, for instance). For Lucid, this will definitely work for
switching between Google and Yahoo!, we don't yet know what other
providers will be in scope for Lucid. If a user has Google set as their
search provider,they will have exactly the experience they do today. If
they switch to Yahoo!, the default home page will switch to using a
Yahoo! search. If they switch back to Google, the default home page will
switch back to using the Google search, exactly like today. Searching
from Chrome will continue to work exactly as it does today.

Change #2
Change #2 is changing the default search provider in Firefox to Yahoo!
Note that this won't in any way effect the ability of a user to choose
and use the search provider of their choice. It's literally 2 easily
discoverable clicks to change this setting, a simple matter of switching
to that search provider in the chrome by clicking on the icon and
choosing the desired provider. Note also that Yahoo! does not share any
personally identifiable or usage information.

Why?
I am pursuing this change because Canonical has negotiated a revenue
sharing deal with Yahoo! and this revenue will help Canonical to provide
developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and
the Ubuntu Platform. This change will help provide these resources as
well as continuing to respect our user's default search across Firefox.

Cheers, Rick




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