7 ms·

My default search engine changed after updating Firefox to version 98

68 points by WayToDoor 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kibibu 5y ago
Are there any details on the nature of the agreement? Is it just permission to use trademarks or something?
- jer0me 5y ago
  I doubt a search engine would not want to be included in Firefox if given the option for free, it’s likely that they stopped paying Mozilla.
  - Mindless2112 5y ago
    Given current leadership, Mozilla might have required search engines to agree to a particular political stance or something of that nature.
david_allison 5y ago
> Mozilla was unable to secure formal permission to continue including certain search engines in Firefox. We provided an opportunity to previously-included search engines to sign an agreement and the engines that did not complete the agreement will be removed from Firefox. Does anyone have a list of the search engines which were removed?
- physhster 5y ago
  Perhaps some government interference?
- Ajedi32 5y ago
  They use the term "permission", but since when do you need to get permission to link to a search engine in a piece of software? Is Firefox being legally required to do this, or did they just decide to do it after the engine(s) in question refused to agree to Mozilla's terms?
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    Honestly, the way I'm reading this is that "they didn't pay us enough to keep them as a first part search engine."
    - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
      And even if, is that a problem? We can use their browser for free and they do a pretty good job at not tracking anyone for huge money. What’s the problem with them having some income?
      - Ajedi32 5y ago
        It's one thing to just not promote a search engine to your users. That I could understand. It's another thing entirely to intentionally override the user's preference and lie to them about why you're doing it. (Assuming they are actually lying and there isn't some sort of bizarre legal reason why they really do have to do things this way.)
      - Barrin92 5y ago
        There is none, however there's a problem with not communicating that in plain English, i.e. "we sell the spots on our preferred search engine list to generate revenue, as of now a few companies have not agreed to those terms and are being removed". For good reasons the general convention is to render sponsorships and ads visible.
        rad_gruchalski 5y ago
        I agree that this would have been a better way to frame it, if that is what happened here.
AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
Is this related to the Linux Mint partnership? https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4244 https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4244 I'm specifically wondering if the impacted users are Mint users who had DDG has their default search engine.
mardifoufs 5y ago
Wait- since when did we need a plug-in/extension to add a default search engine? Did I miss something or is this a new "feature"?
- cmeacham98 5y ago
  You definitely don't as long as the site supports OpenSearch - the link they supply even mentions this. Maybe the engines that were removed don't support it?
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    Yeah, it's weird, their linked support article says you can add any website with opensearch but that's not mentioned in this one. I'd be surprised if search engines that were available before this update either didn't support opensearch or broke their Firefox integration so hard that they needed to be removed. The way the article is worded makes me think this is not a technical issue, though.
    - richardfey 5y ago
      Came here to comment about the same. It's odd that this KB mentions extensions and not OpenSearch. In fact, extensions are always a worse choice from privacy perspective.
      - r3dk1ng 5y ago
        might be related to this: "Mozilla intends to deprecate OpenSearch and eventually remove it from Firefox." https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/10/15/search-engine-add-ons-to-be-removed-from-addons-mozilla-org/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/10/15/search-engine-add...
        richardfey 5y ago
        I think it's a confusing blog post: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/deprecation-of-opensearch-xml-add-ons-current-users/46868/12 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/deprecation-of-opensearch-xm...
thro1 5y ago
Mozilla was unable to secure my formal permission to remove any part of my configuration at first (during an update). Edit: And it's the browser that you have not to update if you want to keep things working as they used to.
frankjr 5y ago
Hm, it looks like the ticket under which they added the "Your default search engine has been changed" message is private. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1748923 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1748923 https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/d28e21ce8c21dd2a746b05f3487d069dfe50cd90 https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/d28e21ce8c21dd2a...
- riedel 5y ago
  It is actually interesting to look through the commit messages. What do you have to actually pay to get your domain specially mentioned in an allow list: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/7b655cecb81e21457c2144fddf489136b9195c0d https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/7b655cecb81e2145...
  - muizelaar 5y ago
    You don't have to pay anything. You just have to acknowledge that your site might break and won't use any unimplemented functionality because the API that's enabled isn't stable enough to be enabled unconditionally yet. The same kind of thing as Chrome's origin trials.
- frankjr 5y ago
  Huh, I've been looking for the list of current search engines to see which have been removed but it seems these engines are not actually statically defined in the source code but rather the list is loaded remotely. And each search engine is actually a web extension. I did not know that! Set `devtools.chrome.enabled` to `true` in `about:config` and then Tools -> Browser Tools -> Browser Console and type: const { RemoteSettings } = ChromeUtils.import("resource://services-settings/remote-settings.js", {}) await RemoteSettings("search-config").get() This looks to be the complete list that gets filtered based on your location, language etc.
squarefoot 5y ago
Mozilla has (had?) an agreement with Google to make their search engine the default one in exchange for no less than $400 million/year. The agreement would last until some time in 2023, so (if that's the reason) it could be a decision from Google to stop paying. https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-google-search-deal/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...
- seaish 5y ago
  Google is the only one to be mentioned in the link (in the screenshot), so I doubt Google is the one that left.
wackget 5y ago
How about listing which fucking search engines are affected? Guess that'd be too easy for Mozilla.
- kevincox 5y ago
  Especially the last section > What countries will be affected by this change? > This change will apply to users in all countries who are using an affected search engine with Mozilla. Why even bother adding this section? How about you give us a list?
- npteljes 5y ago
  Strange because they even censored the search engine name on the screenshot. I really wonder what these engines were.
dblohm7 5y ago
When I worked at Mozilla, the official policy was that when the user overrides the default search engine, then that search engine pref is left alone. (Note that if the user never changed the default, but the default itself changed, for example when Mozilla switched from Google to Yahoo (or vice versa), that was considered to be fair game.) Whenever this happened while I was there, it was always due to an actual bug. I highly doubt that there is anything nefarious going on here.
- Mindless2112 5y ago
  This isn't a bug report. It's a Mozilla KB article about why they changed the search engine preference that you made.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  I'm glad you're optimistic but I've seen too many nefarious things from Mozilla to be as optimistic as you. Mozilla could have included a copy of the contract that they are trying to get search engines to agree too, but they didn't. So much for transparency.
- cmeacham98 5y ago
  Did you even read the linked article? Mozilla is dropping some engines from Firefox (presumably because they stopped paying), so they have to change the preference back to the default because the previous value will no longer be valid.
bijant 5y ago
'smart' move by some MBA on their exec Team that just maximized their personal bonus. If they want the Google subsidies to keep flowing, while they are loosing users they'd better nudge those remaining users to search engines that pay them. I was morally conflicted for a long time for not using firefox and more recently for not even testing in firefox anymore. But I don't feel that way any more. They are beyond saving. IBM, Mozilla, Oracle, morally equivalent. I mainly use ungoogled chromium and safari. Qutebrowser would become my daily driver whenever they implement extension support. They recently secured some EU funding, so there could be a lot of developments soon.Nyxt looks interesting too. https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://qutebrowser.org/ https://qutebrowser.org/ https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/ https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/
- The-Compiler 5y ago
  > Qutebrowser would become my daily driver whenever they implement extension support. If you're thinking of WebExtensions (i.e. Chrome/Firefox/... extensions), that's unlikely to happen without Qt implementing support for it - see the FAQ in https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/30 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/30 for details. > They recently secured some EU funding, so there could be a lot of developments soon. You must be thinking of a different project - though qutebrowser is donation-funded, and I just finished a big chunk of work at the university I'm employed at yesterday. Now I won't do anything there anymore until July or so, so there should be a lot of development in the next couple of months anyways!
  - bijant 5y ago
    This is embarrassing, I confused You with Nyxt. „Nyxt is graciously funded by grants from the European Union Next Generation Internet Initiative. Specifically via the sub-grant providers NLNet and FundingBox.“ I have no idea how much bureaucratic headaches are connected with applying for that kind of funding, but you as the primary maintainer should certainly not spent your time on that. Maybe someone else can look into it, or I can have a look to make up for publicly claiming you had a source of income that you don’t. Sorry again. Personally uBlock origin would be the most pressing extension for me and You do have native adblocking. But for future broad adoption webextensions are absolutely essential. You point out how difficult this is and that full chrome compatibility might be impossible but even partial compatibility excluding UI specific plugins would go a long way.
muizelaar 5y ago
This is the list of search engines https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/tree/master/browser/components/search/extensions https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/tree/master/browser/com... that Firefox ships with. It's a long list so it's easy to imagine that not all of them completed the agreement.
- input_sh 5y ago
  I think(?) this is what you've wanted to link to: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/tree/master/browser/components/search/extensions https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/tree/master/browser/com...
  - muizelaar 5y ago
    Yep, I edited my comment.
- ttybird2 5y ago
  I do not see most of these in my system. This is very weird.
Ourgon 5y ago
From the ashes of the Netscape-source based code rose Phoenix. From the request by that BIOS-company by the same name rose Firebird From the request by the makers of the database by the same name rose Firefox Now, after many years, I'm hoping that from the ashes of the disaster which is the Mitchell Baker misled Mozilla organisation annex political action committee will rise the next iteration of what was destined to be one of the cornerstones of free software, the browser. Call the thing Ouroboros - the snake that eats its tail in a continuous tale of death and rebirth. Call it Fenghuang is you want to pull in some Chinese mindset. Call it Anastasia, call it Babatunde or Yetunde, call it by any other name which is related to rebirth (which all those names I mentioned do) but for the love of ${deity} get rid of the current Mozilla leadership and correct course to where browsers are supposed to go: installed on user devices. Send Mitchell Baker to pasture without a golden handshake. Do whatever it takes.
pxeger1 5y ago
> What countries will be affected by this change? > This change will apply to users in all countries who are using an affected search engine with Mozilla. What a pointless answer.
- netsharc 5y ago
  Luckily the thumbs down button is very close to this moronic non-answer.
nemoniac 5y ago
Mozilla, please! I really, really want to use Firefox but I also want to have a home page on my own hard disc and my own choice of search engine that doesn't get switched out at every upgrade. Please, do better! I'm this close to giving up on you.
- throwoutway 5y ago
  it’s super annoying (this happened to me today again) but it’s not worth switching from Firefox. There’s worse things to be had in the other browsers
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

68 points by WayToDoor 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kibibu 5y ago

Are there any details on the nature of the agreement? Is it just permission to use trademarks or something?

jer0me 5y ago
I doubt a search engine would not want to be included in Firefox if given the option for free, it’s likely that they stopped paying Mozilla.
- Mindless2112 5y ago
  Given current leadership, Mozilla might have required search engines to agree to a particular political stance or something of that nature.

david_allison 5y ago

> Mozilla was unable to secure formal permission to continue including certain search engines in Firefox. We provided an opportunity to previously-included search engines to sign an agreement and the engines that did not complete the agreement will be removed from Firefox. Does anyone have a list of the search engines which were removed?

physhster 5y ago
Perhaps some government interference?
Ajedi32 5y ago
They use the term "permission", but since when do you need to get permission to link to a search engine in a piece of software? Is Firefox being legally required to do this, or did they just decide to do it after the engine(s) in question refused to agree to Mozilla's terms?
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Honestly, the way I'm reading this is that "they didn't pay us enough to keep them as a first part search engine."
  - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    And even if, is that a problem? We can use their browser for free and they do a pretty good job at not tracking anyone for huge money. What’s the problem with them having some income?
    - Ajedi32 5y ago
      It's one thing to just not promote a search engine to your users. That I could understand. It's another thing entirely to intentionally override the user's preference and lie to them about why you're doing it. (Assuming they are actually lying and there isn't some sort of bizarre legal reason why they really do have to do things this way.)
    - Barrin92 5y ago
      There is none, however there's a problem with not communicating that in plain English, i.e. "we sell the spots on our preferred search engine list to generate revenue, as of now a few companies have not agreed to those terms and are being removed". For good reasons the general convention is to render sponsorships and ads visible.
      - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
        I agree that this would have been a better way to frame it, if that is what happened here.

AdmiralAsshat 5y ago

Is this related to the Linux Mint partnership? https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4244 https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4244 I'm specifically wondering if the impacted users are Mint users who had DDG has their default search engine.

mardifoufs 5y ago

Wait- since when did we need a plug-in/extension to add a default search engine? Did I miss something or is this a new "feature"?

cmeacham98 5y ago
You definitely don't as long as the site supports OpenSearch - the link they supply even mentions this. Maybe the engines that were removed don't support it?
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  Yeah, it's weird, their linked support article says you can add any website with opensearch but that's not mentioned in this one. I'd be surprised if search engines that were available before this update either didn't support opensearch or broke their Firefox integration so hard that they needed to be removed. The way the article is worded makes me think this is not a technical issue, though.
  - richardfey 5y ago
    Came here to comment about the same. It's odd that this KB mentions extensions and not OpenSearch. In fact, extensions are always a worse choice from privacy perspective.
    - r3dk1ng 5y ago
      might be related to this: "Mozilla intends to deprecate OpenSearch and eventually remove it from Firefox." https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/10/15/search-engine-add-ons-to-be-removed-from-addons-mozilla-org/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/10/15/search-engine-add...
      - richardfey 5y ago
        I think it's a confusing blog post: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/deprecation-of-opensearch-xml-add-ons-current-users/46868/12 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/deprecation-of-opensearch-xm...

thro1 5y ago

Mozilla was unable to secure my formal permission to remove any part of my configuration at first (during an update). Edit: And it's the browser that you have not to update if you want to keep things working as they used to.

frankjr 5y ago

Hm, it looks like the ticket under which they added the "Your default search engine has been changed" message is private. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1748923 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1748923 https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/d28e21ce8c21dd2a746b05f3487d069dfe50cd90 https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/d28e21ce8c21dd2a...

riedel 5y ago
It is actually interesting to look through the commit messages. What do you have to actually pay to get your domain specially mentioned in an allow list: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/7b655cecb81e21457c2144fddf489136b9195c0d https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/7b655cecb81e2145...
- muizelaar 5y ago
  You don't have to pay anything. You just have to acknowledge that your site might break and won't use any unimplemented functionality because the API that's enabled isn't stable enough to be enabled unconditionally yet. The same kind of thing as Chrome's origin trials.
frankjr 5y ago
Huh, I've been looking for the list of current search engines to see which have been removed but it seems these engines are not actually statically defined in the source code but rather the list is loaded remotely. And each search engine is actually a web extension. I did not know that! Set `devtools.chrome.enabled` to `true` in `about:config` and then Tools -> Browser Tools -> Browser Console and type: const { RemoteSettings } = ChromeUtils.import("resource://services-settings/remote-settings.js", {}) await RemoteSettings("search-config").get() This looks to be the complete list that gets filtered based on your location, language etc.

squarefoot 5y ago

Mozilla has (had?) an agreement with Google to make their search engine the default one in exchange for no less than $400 million/year. The agreement would last until some time in 2023, so (if that's the reason) it could be a decision from Google to stop paying. https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-google-search-deal/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...

seaish 5y ago
Google is the only one to be mentioned in the link (in the screenshot), so I doubt Google is the one that left.

wackget 5y ago

How about listing which fucking search engines are affected? Guess that'd be too easy for Mozilla.

kevincox 5y ago
Especially the last section > What countries will be affected by this change? > This change will apply to users in all countries who are using an affected search engine with Mozilla. Why even bother adding this section? How about you give us a list?
npteljes 5y ago
Strange because they even censored the search engine name on the screenshot. I really wonder what these engines were.

dblohm7 5y ago

When I worked at Mozilla, the official policy was that when the user overrides the default search engine, then that search engine pref is left alone. (Note that if the user never changed the default, but the default itself changed, for example when Mozilla switched from Google to Yahoo (or vice versa), that was considered to be fair game.) Whenever this happened while I was there, it was always due to an actual bug. I highly doubt that there is anything nefarious going on here.

Mindless2112 5y ago
This isn't a bug report. It's a Mozilla KB article about why they changed the search engine preference that you made.
encryptluks2 5y ago
I'm glad you're optimistic but I've seen too many nefarious things from Mozilla to be as optimistic as you. Mozilla could have included a copy of the contract that they are trying to get search engines to agree too, but they didn't. So much for transparency.
cmeacham98 5y ago
Did you even read the linked article? Mozilla is dropping some engines from Firefox (presumably because they stopped paying), so they have to change the preference back to the default because the previous value will no longer be valid.

bijant 5y ago

'smart' move by some MBA on their exec Team that just maximized their personal bonus. If they want the Google subsidies to keep flowing, while they are loosing users they'd better nudge those remaining users to search engines that pay them. I was morally conflicted for a long time for not using firefox and more recently for not even testing in firefox anymore. But I don't feel that way any more. They are beyond saving. IBM, Mozilla, Oracle, morally equivalent. I mainly use ungoogled chromium and safari. Qutebrowser would become my daily driver whenever they implement extension support. They recently secured some EU funding, so there could be a lot of developments soon.Nyxt looks interesting too. https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://qutebrowser.org/ https://qutebrowser.org/ https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/ https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/

The-Compiler 5y ago
> Qutebrowser would become my daily driver whenever they implement extension support. If you're thinking of WebExtensions (i.e. Chrome/Firefox/... extensions), that's unlikely to happen without Qt implementing support for it - see the FAQ in https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/30 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/30 for details. > They recently secured some EU funding, so there could be a lot of developments soon. You must be thinking of a different project - though qutebrowser is donation-funded, and I just finished a big chunk of work at the university I'm employed at yesterday. Now I won't do anything there anymore until July or so, so there should be a lot of development in the next couple of months anyways!
- bijant 5y ago
  This is embarrassing, I confused You with Nyxt. „Nyxt is graciously funded by grants from the European Union Next Generation Internet Initiative. Specifically via the sub-grant providers NLNet and FundingBox.“ I have no idea how much bureaucratic headaches are connected with applying for that kind of funding, but you as the primary maintainer should certainly not spent your time on that. Maybe someone else can look into it, or I can have a look to make up for publicly claiming you had a source of income that you don’t. Sorry again. Personally uBlock origin would be the most pressing extension for me and You do have native adblocking. But for future broad adoption webextensions are absolutely essential. You point out how difficult this is and that full chrome compatibility might be impossible but even partial compatibility excluding UI specific plugins would go a long way.

muizelaar 5y ago

This is the list of search engines https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/tree/master/browser/components/search/extensions https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/tree/master/browser/com... that Firefox ships with. It's a long list so it's easy to imagine that not all of them completed the agreement.

input_sh 5y ago
I think(?) this is what you've wanted to link to: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/tree/master/browser/components/search/extensions https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/tree/master/browser/com...
- muizelaar 5y ago
  Yep, I edited my comment.
ttybird2 5y ago
I do not see most of these in my system. This is very weird.

Ourgon 5y ago

From the ashes of the Netscape-source based code rose Phoenix. From the request by that BIOS-company by the same name rose Firebird From the request by the makers of the database by the same name rose Firefox Now, after many years, I'm hoping that from the ashes of the disaster which is the Mitchell Baker misled Mozilla organisation annex political action committee will rise the next iteration of what was destined to be one of the cornerstones of free software, the browser. Call the thing Ouroboros - the snake that eats its tail in a continuous tale of death and rebirth. Call it Fenghuang is you want to pull in some Chinese mindset. Call it Anastasia, call it Babatunde or Yetunde, call it by any other name which is related to rebirth (which all those names I mentioned do) but for the love of ${deity} get rid of the current Mozilla leadership and correct course to where browsers are supposed to go: installed on user devices. Send Mitchell Baker to pasture without a golden handshake. Do whatever it takes.

pxeger1 5y ago

> What countries will be affected by this change? > This change will apply to users in all countries who are using an affected search engine with Mozilla. What a pointless answer.

netsharc 5y ago
Luckily the thumbs down button is very close to this moronic non-answer.

nemoniac 5y ago

Mozilla, please! I really, really want to use Firefox but I also want to have a home page on my own hard disc and my own choice of search engine that doesn't get switched out at every upgrade. Please, do better! I'm this close to giving up on you.

throwoutway 5y ago
it’s super annoying (this happened to me today again) but it’s not worth switching from Firefox. There’s worse things to be had in the other browsers

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]