I’m using the Aurora/Firefox Developer 35.0a2 (2014-11-20) and Google is still the default. Though that may likely be because I updated and didn’t do a fresh install.
Luckily it’s trivially easy to change!
What is “trivially easy” for you can be a difficult, mystifying process for some people, if they even think to try doing it at all.
There are plenty of older, technologically inept folks that I’ve recommended Firefox to because it was easier and safer to use than Internet Explorer, but more “conventional” than Chrome. Those people would not be able to change their default search engine on their own.
Well, hopefully you’re helping out those older folks set it up. I, too, have recommended that my older relatives use FFox instead of IE, but I don’t just throw it at them and run away. I help them set it up with extra addons like adblock, etc… Not to mention getting rid of the weird default menu/tab layout that Firefox has now. And it takes literally 10 seconds to change the default search provider in Firefox, it’s pretty easy to walk those folks through it if you’re doing tech support from afar.
Remember this is only in the USA (and Canada?) - Cory omitted to mention it, but the linked article specifies it won’t be Yahoo for Russia or China, and that Mozilla aren’t planning to change the default (i.e. Google) elsewhere.
Again in the linked article, it says this won’t be implemented until into December.
Do you hear that? It’s the sound of millions of Firefox users saying “what the hell is this?” and then changing it back.
Immaterial design?
I still know a couple of AOL customers, so anything’s possible.
Ha! We may know the same AOL users. I audibly scoff any time I email them. (They probably still visit Geocities sites, too.) Alas!
its like you were in my bedroom. creep.
Because these “older folks” need to have a Google default instead of a Yahoo one?
i think youve taken that out of context
I sometimes use Yahoo!* and IMHO the search results aren’t a patch on Google’s. The image search for example is horribly clunky. It’s a shame Mozilla didn’t go with DuckDuckGo but they’ve got bills to pay so that’s cool with me.
I’m wondering: will the default search change for existing users, or is it just new installs?
*can’t work out if I need the exclamation mark or not. I’m leaving it in.
Not that it would anyway, but this can’t matter to me anymore; I’ve been using Pale Moon (a FF fork) since Mozilla borked the interface. It runs better too.
Isn’t that what LMGTFY is for?
“Older folks” was a term used by cahutchins, who I was replying to. And if you’ve had to deal with any technologically unsavvy relatives/acquantaines with computers (in my experience, these have all been relatives in their 60’s or 70’s), yes, sometimes something as simple as switching their default search engine from Google to Yahoo can be completely terrifying. Hell, just getting these relatives onto Firefox was a hard fought battle - I changed the icon on their desktop app to be the IE icon so they would know what to open up to get to the internet. And I can’t speak to the quality of Yahoo’s search results these days, since I haven’t used it in as long as I can remember (if I ever did), but at least Google is, for the most part, fairly reliable.
Has anyone found a way to change the search engine Spotlight uses in OS X 10.10 yet?
In other news, yahoo is still a search engine?
I would have thought that after Wired’s “Pray” cover for Apple that the digerati would have gotten out of the Tech Death Watch game.
I used Yahoo for YEARS – since the days of Netscape. Set up my first email on Yahoo (my primary one, in fact) and had a Yahoo homepage. My weather report for the locations I wanted. Local movie listings. And ALL of the bookmarks I frequently accessed. Then POOF! All gone. I haven’t been back since.
I set up a homepage on another service and tried as best I could to recreate what worked for me so well for so many years. I changed over to my local ISP for email. Do I like it as well as what I had before Marissa Mayer torched it? No, but Yahoo is dead to me.
