October 7, 2010

Firefox 4 likely to feature Bing as search engine option

Yesterday Robert Scoble, renowned tech enthusiast and blogger, tweeted that he had heard Bing will be announced as the default search engine on the new Firefox today. He later clarified the news to state that Bing will only be added as a search option in Firefox 4.

Mozilla is expected to announce later today its plans on whether it will add Bing as a search option to its Firefox Internet browser. This follows a recent screenshot of Firefox 4, via Liveside, in which Bing was shown off. It is certainly an interesting choice of website to show considering Mozilla have previously made little mention of Bing.

Google and Yahoo! are currently the two search engines in Firefox’s search engine list and now that Yahoo! is powered by Bing, in the US at least, it makes sense for Bing to sit beside the two.

If this news is correct then it will add to Bing’s credibility as the search engine to combat Google. Mozilla will be following Apple’s footsteps too, Bing was recently added as a search option for the Safari web browser.

It's unclear what else Mozilla may announce today. On September 14 Mozilla made available the latest version of the Firefox beta, number 6. This was one day before Microsoft announced its own beta version of Internet Explorer 9.

Update: Mozilla and Bing have announced that Bing will indeed one of the "out of the box" options of search engines in the up coming build of Firefox 4.

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