Official "Firefox With Bing" Released 274
MrSeb writes "Mozilla is now distributing a version of Firefox that uses Bing as the default search provider instead of Google. Rest assured that this is a joint project, though: the creatively-named Firefox with Bing website is run by Microsoft, and both Mozilla and MS are clear that this is a joint venture. Now, don't get too excited — the default version of Firefox available from Mozilla.com is still backed by Google, and there's no mention of an alternative, Bingy download anywhere on the site — but it's worth noting that Mozilla has been testing Bing's capabilities using Test Pilot over the last couple of months, and the release of Firefox with Bing indicates that Mozilla is now confident in Bing's ability to provide a top-notch service to Firefox users. Mozilla might be readying a large-scale switch to Bing when its current contract with Google expires in November."
Re:Bing (Score:4, Informative)
More astroturfing from TechLA.
Re:Whats this "instead of Google" shit? (Score:1, Informative)
You thought wrong. [zdnet.com]
Re:Bing (Score:5, Informative)
Check out his history, it pretty much confirms Radres' claim.
Re:Other Engines? (Score:4, Informative)
The whole point of that version is, "Microsoft paid Mozilla enough to release a Binged version of Firefox".
Most of Mozilla's income comes from Google paying Mozilla for every time someone searches Google using the Firefox start page or the search bar.
Re:Bing (Score:3, Informative)
Last time he popped up it was with another huge wall of copy paste garbage for WinPhone.
Re:Bing (Score:3, Informative)
Nope, just shills who copy paste in a wall of marketing drivel.
I like how you make excuses too, just like a shill. You could not even stick with your hate of products, you had to make excuses.
Re:Whats this "instead of Google" shit? (Score:1, Informative)
We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed.
What part of this you don't understand?
Re:Whats this "instead of Google" shit? (Score:4, Informative)
You thought wrong. [zdnet.com]
Did you actually read the article you linked to? Microsoft denies it, yes, but the article seems to come up with the same conclusion, that they did use Google to get some of their results (obviously, they can't use Google for **all** their results, because they'd lose their #1 ranking for many of their own internet properties, not something that they would want).
Just read the quote from Bing's Vice President, Harry Shum, on that very same article you linked to. His denial is so guarded, tangential, and so carefully well-crafted, that it's not telling us anything of what really happened. His failed attempt at obfuscation is pretty damning. If you ask me, he should just have kept his mouth shut.
Re:I've actually been using bing lately (Score:2, Informative)
I just changed my home page from google to duckduckgo. It's been set to google for over a decade, but this shit with removing the + operator was the last straw. Some of the other stuff (like the black bar and the preview and moving the cache link to the stupid preview thing) was basically cosmetic, but doing away with the plus operator decreases the functionality of their core product. This has really created a lot of extra, stupid work for me (super frustrated that it was all because of the google+ crap).
Re:Can Mozilla piss off their users any more? (Score:4, Informative)
As a professional developer in the web/services space, I'm using firebug most of the time. I find it most capable of dealing with highly dynamic DOM/css. There are most definitely bugs and issues with it but they aren't deal breakers. It does crash. Some stuff doesn't work. You sometimes get back garbage values. But all that considered, I still find it to be a better debugging tool than either the IE dev tools or chrome's tools. I'll also say that I do use all three toolsets. This isn't an "i only use firebug" fanboy reaction. I live and breath all three, as well as a pile of proprietary internal tools. But as far as debugging highly complex dynamic pages, firebug is my first choice by far.
LMGTFY (Score:2, Informative)
about:config -> browser.urlbar.trimURLs = false
Boom, done. Was that so hard to Google?
Re:Bing (Score:2, Informative)
Ha, I've been very pro Microsoft in the past - all my machines run Windows and all my smartphones run Windows Mobile.
However Windows Phone 7 a complete disaster. It can't run old applications. People wanting to port C/C++ applications to it need to rewrite completely in managed C# or apply for a special pass from Microsoft to use native code. Microsoft's market share is dropping like a rock as Windows Mobile users move to Android instead of Windows Phone 7. Actually the application I most depend on on Windows Mobile - Pleco - works on Windows Mobile and iPhone and has a beta that runs on Android. It's never going to support Windows Phone. Even if Microsoft gave them a native code pass Pleco have said that they won't support WP7 unless everyone gets native code rights -
http://www.plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=19990&sid=8d1f4894881d1b4653a82de2614656f8#p19990 [plecoforums.com]
gato wrote:
The rumor is that other companies are also getting special privileges. The Spotify music service has been announced for Windows Phone 7, but it is hard to believe that the music will stop whenever the user switches task. One attendee told me that the Windows Phone 7 native code framework is called Iris, is based on what was used for the Zune music player, and is used by Microsoft as well as by Spotify. He added that major games developers will also be allowed to use native code.
Neither Apple nor Google have stooped as low as giving big developers the tools to make their apps significantly better / faster / more feature-rich than small developers'; if this is true, it's basically the mobile app equivalent of (not having) net neutrality, give the big guys everything they want and shut the little guys out. Microsoft might be able to make EA happy this way, but EA's iPhone games suck - if Microsoft wants to get the next Angry Birds or Flight Control or, for that matter, Pleco on WP7, they have to open up their native code APIs to everyone and not treat small companies like second-class citizens. Giving us access 6 months later isn't the same, either - if anybody gets to use a particular framework to develop shipping apps, then everybody should get access to that same framework; if it's not ready for prime time yet, release the beta version to everyone and only make it official once it is.
Windows Phone is a bizarre idea. You can move from Windows Mobile to WP7. None of your old applications work and the ones available on WP7 are far inferior because (for things like Pleco) they can't use third party libraries for things like OCR and handwriting recognition. Or you can move to Android. Most of the applications you liked on Windows Mobile have already been ported to Android. And the phones are cheaper and not at all locked down - all the custom Rom chefs have moved to Android already. You can tether and access the device as mass storage. You can sideload applications. I.e.Android is just like WinMo but not at all like WP7. And people like HTC who made your old WinMo handset have loads of Android devices but very few WP7 ones. It's almost like Microsoft want people to buy Android.
Last but not least they've pissed off their ISVs by telling them they can either rewrite fucking everything - something they don't need to do on Android and iPhone which have much better sales - or presumably pay/beg Microsoft for the right to use their old Windows Mobile code via a native code pass. Adobe are rumoured to have a native code pass for Flash. But given WP7's dire sales it seems like Adobe have decided that even with that it's not worth the bother of supporting WP7. I reckon WP7 will be killed of at some point like Zune and Kin - both of which were based on the same technologies and marketing team. By that point everyone that run custom applications or Roms on WinMo (and face it that was the only reason people bought Windows Mobile devices) will simply have moved over to Android and will be content there. So it's not like they'd be tempted back even if Microsoft release a back compatible successor to Windows Mobile.
Re:Whats this "instead of Google" shit? (Score:2, Informative)
Therefore, the only reason to track through the Toolbar is to take advantage of the results provided by other engines.
Duh?
The point of it is that if you go to Bob's Forums and search for "walnut", you might get a result that Bing would never have thought of on its own. So what it does is it takes that search string, the resulting page, and inserts it into its database so the next time someone goes to Bing and types in "Bob's Forums walnut", they're more likely to get that resulting page.
There's nothing wrong with that. That's the exact point of the toolbar, in fact.
The only thing even slightly shady about this is that Bing didn't disable this feature for Google.com, so if you do the search on Google, the term could appear in Bing the same way it does for Bob's Forums.
But Bing's toolbar didn't conduct the Google search. It didn't contact Google's servers. The text was copied from a user's computer, and that user had agreed, all legal-like, to send the data to Bing. Again: it wasn't doing anything wrong.
The engineer who made that complaint obviously didn't stop to think about how those results could get to Bing, even if Bing never queries Google. Instead he leaped to the conclusion that Bing was somehow stealing their database(?).
And to make things even worse, Google Toolbar, back in the day, used to do this exact same thing.
Of course the problem is:
1) Google "does no evil" so obviously if they say Bing is stealing, Bing must be stealing
2) Explaining what's really going on takes longer than the average media soundbyte