Yandex and Mozilla Stop their Agreement in Russia

With the upcoming release of Firefox 14 expected next month, we have recently learnt that Firefox will end its partnership with the Russian search giant Yandex as its default search engine for the Russian-based version of Firefox.

Google and Mozilla, a Three-Year Partnership

The reason is quite simple, last December, Google and Mozilla announced a new three-year global agreement that defines Google as the default search engine for Firefox and as expected Yandex will be replaced by the Russian version of Google as a default search engine. Harvey Anderson, Mozilla's chief counsel, said that “We recently selected Google as the default search partner for Firefox[...]These arrangements are often global in nature ; consequently, we were not able to keep Yandex as the default search provider in the Firefox Russian builds.”

Yandex , a Tsar in Russian Market

The previous contract which bound Mozilla and the Russian Search Engine will stop on December, 31^st 2012. Yandex has been the default search engine for the Russian-language version of Firefox since the beginning of 2009. As a consequence, Yandex has announced that it will release its own version of Mozilla’s Firefox from the Yandex network websites with Yandex as the default search engine.

Moreover, we may expect some changes in the search engine pie in Russia as the Russian search engine owns a large 60% market share while Google has only 26.5% but at the same time, Firefox is spreading very quickly across Russian computers.

A spokesperson at Yandex added that Mozilla’s choice won’t affect its market share in Russia significantly and estimate a 1.5 percent loss in the next few months.