So I opened Firefox this morning like I do every morning, typed something into the address bar without thinking about it, and got Yahoo results instead of Google. Turns out I'd clicked "yes" on some update prompt a few days back without reading it, and that update apparently already had a preview of what's coming. Because yesterday Mozilla and Yahoo made it official: starting with Firefox 34 in December, Yahoo becomes the default search engine for US users. Google is out, after being the default in Firefox literally since the browser existed in its modern form, something like a decade now.
I want to be annoyed about this and I sort of am, but I also get it. Mozilla's whole existence depends on search deal revenue, that's basically the entire business model of a nonprofit that ships a free browser, and everyone's been saying for a year or two that the Google deal was getting tense in renewal talks. Google's been putting its money and its UI hooks into Chrome for years now anyway. So Mozilla needed a partner willing to pay for placement, and Yahoo, under Marissa Mayer, has apparently decided that being a real search engine again is worth spending real money on. Five years is the length of this deal, which is a long runway for a company that's spent most of the last decade being a punchline.
Here's my actual complaint though, and it's not really about the business logic, it's about the product. I tried Yahoo search out of morbid curiosity before I flipped my default back. I searched "nginx reverse proxy websocket config" because that's literally what I was debugging at 11pm last night, and the Yahoo results were... fine? Not bad, not great. A couple of the same Stack Overflow threads Google would've surfaced, buried one slot lower behind what looked like a semi-relevant IBM developerWorks article from 2011. It's not the disaster I remember Yahoo search being back when it still ran on its own tech before the whole Bing-powered-backend era. But "not a disaster" isn't really a pitch, is it? I didn't switch away from it because it insulted me, I switched back because Google's just been my muscle memory for so long that anything else feels like driving a rental car.
Anyway if you're on Firefox and want to keep Google as default, it's not hard: Preferences, Search, change the default dropdown back. Took me four seconds. Which is sort of the awkward part of this whole story, honestly — Mozilla can pick a default, but they can't actually make thirty million US Firefox users stick with it if the alternative is one dropdown menu away. I'd bet real money that inside six months there's a stat floating around about how much of that traffic bounced right back to Google anyway. Default matters a lot for the average person who never opens Preferences in their life, and probably not much at all for anyone reading a blog like this one.
There's also something a little sad about it if you've been using the internet long enough. I remember Yahoo when it was the front door to everything, when Yahoo Mail was the email address you had before Gmail existed, when Yahoo Search results were just… what search results were, before "just Google it" became a verb everyone's grandmother uses. Watching Yahoo pay its way back into relevance instead of earning it on product quality alone feels like watching someone buy their way back into a party they used to throw. Not their fault, exactly. Just kind of the state of things in 2014.
I don't think this changes much for me day to day, since I flipped it back to Google in under a minute and won't think about it again until the next update prompt tries to sneak something else past me while I'm not paying attention. But it's a weird little marker of how much the search landscape has consolidated around one company that it's actual news, actual front-page-of-every-tech-blog news, when a browser maker picks a different default. Ten years ago that would've been a Tuesday.