Mozilla, Yahoo Partnership Has Been A Boon

Mozilla’s partnership with Yahoo has quadrupled the search provider’s usage by those running Firefox in the U.S., but the browser’s users still prefer Google, according to data from an Irish analytics company.

Data provided to Computerworld by StatCounter showed that Yahoo’s search engine referred more than four times the number of pages visited by Firefox 34 than did the browser’s predecessor, Firefox 33, in the U.S.

Mozilla changed the default search from Google to Yahoo when it released Firefox 34 on Dec. 1. Firefox 33, which a small percentage of users continue to run, uses Google as its default search provider.

StatCounter’s numbers, described as usage share, are based on the number of page views each browser accumulates on the three million sites that deploy the firm’s analytics package, so they are more an indication of activity than a user tally. The company counts page referrals from search providers, not search queries.

As of Jan. 6, Yahoo’s search usage share on Firefox 34 was 32.2%, or more than four times the 7.5% that Yahoo had on Firefox 33 on the same day.

The Yahoo increase in Firefox 34 came at the expense of Google, which had a 60.8% share in that version, significantly lower than the 86.1% in Firefox 33. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Bing search engine, at 5.5% in Firefox 34, was only slightly up from the 5.4% in Firefox 33.

On Jan. 6, StatCounter’s search provider usage shares for all browsers in the U.S. were 75.3% for Google, 12.4% for Bing and 10.5% for Yahoo. In other words, Firefox 34 users were more than three times likelier to reach a destination page from a Yahoo search than the U.S. average because of the new default.

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