Firefox 4 ready to release–with Bing included

Looks like the search war is just heating up further more. There’s no denying the fact that from the time Bing launched to now, which is about a year, its popularity among the search engines has definitely soared. But the news coming out of the Firefox stable is evidence to the fact that businesses too are taking a serious note about Bing.

Mozilla has announced that when it’s latest version of the browser, Firefox 4, will release towards the end of  this year, it will have Bing as one of the search options for the users. Firefox has mentioned that it has taken this move because Bing has won few hearts among customers and has provided them a unique value proposition because of which they are sending in requests to Firefox to include it as a one of the search options. The default option will however the market leader – Google.

Apart from including Bing, there are few more changes in the upcoming Firefox browser with respect to search options for the user.  They’re dropping couple of search options – one being answers.com and the other is Creative Commons. Answers.com for obvious reasons that Wiki has just wrenched the initiative from the other competitors leaving very little customer base for answers.com. The reason for dropping Creative Commons however is interesting because Mozilla claims that CC seem to have moved their company’s vision from searching licensed content to being a generic search engine and obviously there are bigger players in the generic search space than CC. So what the users of Firefox 4 will see in terms of search will be the following list – Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, eBay, and Wikipedia.

But you pokies games may ask that these changes are primarily on the search front. What about the other areas. Well there are significant changes in the other areas of the browser as well particularly in the areas of performance optimization and advanced graphics capabilities.

So much for the search war, lets talk about the browser war itself. Very interestingly, there is a stiff battle for 2nd and 3rd spots there  – the first taken by IE with a huge margin which it has been maintaining steady for sometime now and with the positive news on IE 9 it looks like that dominance is going to stay. The 2nd spot is currently taken by Firefox and the 3rd by Chrome. Now what’s interesting is that Mozilla and Google have an advertisement revenue sharing deal between them, by virtue of which Google pays Mozilla a share whenever you use Firefox to traverse to Google’s ad space. Now that share in no mean number – It earned Mozilla close to $80 million in 2009. With Chrome playing catch up with Firefox, it will be very interesting to see if the revenue sharing deal will still remain. Analysts say that it’s very unlikely that Google will snap the deal because even if Chrome surpasses Firefox, it still means that Firefox will have significant market share, even at third. Google will not want any dent on their ad revenue which is their sole bread winner. Especially with Bing ( Yahoo) catching up real fast.

-S