Firefox With Bing

In a blog post today, Bing invites people to download a version of “Firefox With Bing” where Bing is used as the default search engine for the Firefox search box and for searches conducted from the “AwesomeBar” address window:

In most countries, Firefox uses Google as its default search engine, thanks to a deal between Google and Firefox. Until last year, Bing wasn’t even an alternative option offered within the browser.

Bing: Any Browser Is A Good Browser

A Bing-Firefox deal last year finally fixed that issue. But today’s news is something entirely in its own league, a Microsoft division encouraging people to download a rival product of another division.

But it’s that type of attitude that I wrote in 2008 Microsoft needed to take, if it wanted to really win in search:

For Microsoft to succeed in search, I want them to forget how search integrates with Windows or Internet Explorer (sidenote: after being integrated in various ways for a decade now, clearly that’s not going to be a Google-killing tactic). Forget how search might tie into Office. Use Macs. Use Firefox. Hell, use Google Chrome. I want search products that succeed on their own.

Defaults Aren’t What You Assume

By the way, Bing is not the default in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, as some people assume. To my understanding, it’s the default only where it has done deals with hardware manufacturers or in the rare case when Internet Explorer is installed on a “clean” computer with no prior operating system.

As for Google’s Chrome, Google has usually been the default there, unless you install Chrome on a computer where Google is not already the default in another browser. In those cases, it typically has asked if you want to change to Google search.

Recently, however, I’ve noticed that on Apple computers, installing Chrome causes it to deliberately ask if you want to use Google, Yahoo or Bing. This has happened to me twice in the past two weeks. Potentially, the same is now happening on Windows computers. I just haven’t done any installs on them, recently.

For related news on the topic, see Techmeme.

Internet Explorer Is Big On Bing

The figures come from a new report by Chitika, which analyzed a week’s worth of traffic across its ad network sites from July 20 to 26, 2011, for North America. Chitika says almost 75% of all Bing search traffic comes from IE users:

Our internal stats here at Search Engine Land confirm what Chitika’s data shows about the strength of Bing usage among IE users.

We went all the way back to the start of the year to see browser usage among both Bing. Our numbers show an even higher percentage of Bing traffic coming from IE users — almost 77%:

For IE, Computer Maker Set Default Choice

While you might think that Bing does well because it’s automatically the default choice in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, that’s not the case. Computer manufacturers themselves generally set the default on new computers.

Google had been very aggressive on this front buying default positioning until around 2008. After that, Microsoft led such deals. The article below explains more:

• Deal Puts Microsoft Live Search On Dell Computers, Verizon Phones — Will It Help?

If you upgrade your computer, I believe that Internet Explorer 9 will use whatever settings you currently have. That’s how Internet Explorer 8 has worked:

• Search & Internet Explorer 8

Benchmarking Internet Explorer

How’s the 75% Internet Explorer usage that Chitika found compare to usage overall? Here’s the breakdown for all traffic use:

As you can see, Internet Explorer has a 52% overall usage. That means the 75% usage by Bing visitors is well above normal. Those deals Microsoft has been cutting are paying off.

Google: Home To The “Alternative” Browsers

That leads to Google? What’s the situation there?

Overall, Internet Explorer is only used by about 40% of visitors to Google Search. After that, Firefox just barely leads Chrome as the most popular browser, 20.3% to 20.1%. Safari is just behind at 19%.

On Search Engine Land, we see a different view. Firefox is actually the leading browser used by people who find us through Google Searcho at 34%, followed by Internet Explorer at 30%, Chrome at 26% and Safari at 10%:

Google has deals with both Firefox and Apple to be the default choice in those browsers. Those deals and arrangements are clearly working well to give Google independence from any lockout the company has long-feared might happen (but never has) in Internet Explorer.

Here’s some more background on all of this:

• Firefox: Google’s Secret Weapon Against Microsoft?
• Google & Mozilla Extend Default Firefox Search Provider Deal<
• Hey Firefox – Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine!
• Firefox 4 To Add Bing As Search Option
• Google & Apple Extend Search Deal, Emerge As “Frenemies” Not “Froes”
• Apple Renews Maps Deal With Google — What’s Up With That?

In Chrome, Google is the default choice, but only on a new computer that hasn’t already got a browser with a default search engine. If you install Chrome on an existing computer, it will honor whatever your current default is, though it asks for this to be reconfirmed. This is a past article about this, and I believe the situation hasn’t changed:

• Searching With Google Chrome & Omnibox

Matt McGee contributed to this report.

After measuring activity across the 80,000 or so sites in its ad network, Chitika reports that Bing usage is tied to which version of Internet Explorer a person uses. Specifically, Bing usage increases as users upgrade to newer versions of Internet Explorer.

As you can see, Bing usage jumps from 16.9% among IE8 users to 22.9% among IE9 users — that’s a 35% gain.

Is this just a case of IE9 making Bing the user’s default search engine? No, not really. A Microsoft spokesperson says users who upgrade from one version of IE to IE9 will maintain the same preferred search provider they chose previously:

If a user has selected another search provider as the default (via the IE Gallery) in a previous version, that preference will be preserved when upgrading to IE9. Bing is the default on new IE9 installs.

So, it sounds like the explanation for Bing’s popularity among IE9 users is either A) A lot of people are switching from another browser to IE9 and using Bing by default, or B) a lot of IE9 users are upgrading and switching to Bing at the same time.

Google, of course, remains the number one search engine among all IE users. But it’s interesting to note that Google does see a drop-off in usage between IE8 and IE9, corresponding to some degree with Bing’s increase in usage between IE8 and IE9.

And then there’s Yahoo. According to activity across Chitika’s network, Yahoo users are generally web browser luddites. Ouch.

Postscript: I should also mention the possible impact on browser/search engine use from deals and partnerships that have been struck over the years between the major search engines and various computer makers. Here are a few of our past stories covering that topic:

• Deal Puts Microsoft Live Search On Dell Computers, Verizon Phones — Will It Help?
• CES: Microsoft Expands Scope Of HP Search Relationship To 42 Countries
• Bartz: Yahoo’s Search Decline Due To Dead Toolbar Deals

The two things I’m going to discuss in this post are Microsoft’s “Live Search Accelerators” and Yahoo’s new “visual search shortcuts.”

Live Search Accelerators perform a range of functions, searches or lookups on, for example, a piece of text, a product name or address within a web page. You can also translate text into another language or send it to Facebook or Digg, among other options. To use the tired phrase: it’s like right click “on steroids.”

Users highlight the text and an Accelerator icon appears. That in turn opens a menu with various options with what to do with the passage or text (those options can be expanded with a range of add-ons). The benefit is that information or a search result appears in a window on the page so you don’t have to open a new tab or visit another site to get the desired information.

This is a great feature; however, I was having some difficulty getting it to work on my older PC laptop (probably a function of the laptop rather than IE8).

Here’s a list of all the current Accelerator add-ons. The mapping Accelerator, one of the most useful features in my mind, allows users to lookup addresses on Live Search Maps or Yahoo Maps right on the page you’re on. So if you want to see what neighborhood a particular hotel is located in, you can do that without going “over” to a mapping site. Conspicuously absent, however, are options to use Google Maps or MapQuest.

Hopefully those options will be added in the near term.

I’m sure that Microsoft sees this and other features of IE8 as a way to grow share in various categories and expose Live Search (or whatever it becomes) to more users. So there’s some tension between using this property to advance Microsoft’s specific interests and offering a service or toolset that is fully user centric. I’m sure the developers would argue the company is trying to do the latter.

The other development I wanted to discuss is Yahoo’s “visual search shortcuts.” This operates from the search box on the browser toolbar. Yahoo must first be selected as the search provider in the IE 8 search box (Live Search is the default). If you then enter a query you see search suggestions but also “shortcuts” for certain categories of information: stocks, movie showtimes, movie reviews and weather.

Here’s an example of what you get on a lookup for the stock quote for “Yhoo”:

Like Accelerators, this feature is also very helpful in quickly getting to desired information without opening new tabs or pages. Yahoo says that it will roll out more categories of shortcuts in the future.

There are no ads in visual shortcuts for IE8 however. If one were to perform the same searches on Yahoo proper there would be, or potentially be, sponsored listings that appeared with search results.

1. It’s being built from the ground up. The Google engineers involved understood that modern day web browsing is about applications and rich media, which normal browsers are not built for, so they started from scratch.

2. Well, not entirely. Chrome is being built on WebKit, the basis of Apple’s Safari browser and the browser in the Google Android mobile platform, and using Google Gears, a web applications plug-in/platform.

3. To deal with the new types of demands users make of web browsers, Chrome will use multi-processing to handle all those demands, giving each element of a page (a JavaScript Command, a Flash video) its own memory and process, instead of the single-threading architecture used by today’s browsers. Multi-threading should make Chrome faster and more secure.

4. New tabs, above the address bar, will handle those different processes. So JavaScript threads will be in one tab and a video in another, allowing each to load simultaneously, reducing memory load, and ensuring that one bug in a page doesn’t crash the whole site (or whole browser), just that tab.

5. To make things even faster, Chrome will use a new JavaScript Virtual Machine from Denmark called V8.

6. Still not fast enough? Chrome’s Task Manager will function like Windows Task Manager, and allow you to find processes (even plug-ins) that are hogging resources or crashing, and just kill that process. No more closing tabs when the browser slows down; now you can go straight to the problem.

7. OK, faster? Chrome’s Omnibox can help. When you start typing in the address bar, Chrome offers suggestions to autocomplete your request–and not just based on your history and bookmarks like Firefox does, but also based on the most popular web sites as calculated by Google. You can even search a site from the address bar by typing a site name and hitting tab.

8. This one is on par with IE8 and the newest version of Firefox: a privacy mode, where you can browse without anything from the session being written to your computer–no cache, no history, no cookies, nothing. (Dubbed “porn mode” by most blogs, but with serious applications, such as public browsing, as well.)

9. Convenience is further advanced by a personalized home page with screenshots of the pages you visit most.

10. It’s extra secure; the browser includes Google’s ever-growing list of spyware and malware sites, and every tab is “sandboxed,” which means whatever happens in the tabs can’t affect your computer. (No more need to download Sandboxie). And no more pop-ups, not even JavaScript ones. Every pop-up is contained in the tab in starts in, collected as a small link on the bottom of the page. You can drag it off the page to see it, but it won’t pop up without your permission.

After installing the software, I’m asked if I want to use "Express Settings" or to make active choices:

Notice that Live Search is set to be my search provider if I go with Express Settings. This is good if whatever is already your default provider in IE7 is retained. In other words, if my default was Google, then I’m happy if Express Settings retains that. But I couldn’t tell this with my initial testing. That’s because in IE7, Live Search was my default provider already. It’s very, very bad if by "Express," IE8 simply changes things to be Live Search. I’ll try to test this more later.

Since I went for the "Choose my settings" option, I next got a screen like this, asking me to select a search provider:

As mentioned, In IE7, my default provider was Live Search already. This fact is highlighted for me, but I have to make a conscious choice to keep my default or select a different option. This is identical to how Internet Explorer 7 works. A screenshot from when IE7 first launched:

As I said when this behavior came in with IE7, I think asking people to make a choice is fine. Sure, Microsoft hopes they’ll change a few minds. But if your default choice was already Google, that’s not changed against your will. Indeed, the process is more open than Firefox, which does nothing to highlight the fact that a default provider has already been selected for you (see Hey Firefox - Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine! for more about that).

I chose to select from a list of other providers, and then it seemed like nothing happened. Instead, I got more screens to configure other options, then I got a welcome page that appeared:

Look at the top. It took me some time to realize that way back when I said I wanted to choose a search provider, IE8 opened a tab (see the Add Search Provider one, second from the left) allowing me to pick from this page that has no particular favoritism.

I’d have preferred if this page was made more visible as part of the initial configuration. I mean, here I am deliberately watching for such an option, and I missed it. I’d assume many ordinary consumers would miss it as well.

What do the choices do for you? As with IE7, IE8 has a search box in the top right hand side of the browser:

The choices allow you to add more search engines to that box or change whatever is the default there:

After selecting Google and making it my default, the box changes:

So far, there’s nothing that dramatic or new. But I’d read in various places about how that search box was supposed to have some cool "visual" or thumbnail search options. Where were these? Nothing I went through at installation prompted me to add them, nor did any of the search settings within IE8 seem to point you at them.

In the end, it was via the official Internet Explorer blog where I found them. The post about IE8′s beta illustrated some of these Visual Search choices and linked to some from the New York Times and Amazon but oddly not to the main home page containing all of them.

If you want them all, find them here:

I can swear that when I originally looked, Google wasn’t one of the options. Maybe I missed it. Regardless, Google’s certainly there now. And while Yahoo is featured in that screenshot, the option rotates — Wikipedia appeared when I later looked.

If you add one of these and already have the "non-visual" version in your toolbar, you’ll get a choice to either replace that with the new one or have both.

What’s supposed to happen is that when you have some of these options, they’ll preload results as you type. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get this feature to work — not even with the exact same search providers and search terms illustrated in the IE8 blog post.

Somewhat related to search is the "InPrivate" blocking feature which is designed to limit or prevent sites from tracking you across the web. Somewhat related because there have been some reports that with this feature enabled, ads are blocked on sites – and some of those could be Google AdSense ads.

I can’t confirm any of this because as far as I can tell, InPrivate isn’t enabled by default in my version of IE8 nor is there anyway to enable it, that I can tell. The IE8 blog talks about the feature, but heck if I can get it going. When and if I can, I’ll look at the blocking in more detail.

In general, as a site publisher, I’d prefer that a browser does not block ads by default. Ads are a major way that we and other sites pay for the content we publish freely online. Some might also see any default ad blocking as a way for Microsoft to somehow take a swing at Google through its browser. If so, then Microsoft would be swinging against itself, too – since it has major online ad aspirations.

My expectation would be that ad blocking is not a default option and that in the case of cross-site scripting protection, we might see the ability for trusted sites to be excluded from blocking (if that’s not already in there).

For more on today’s release, see here on Techmeme — and News.com had a nice summary of key features, I thought.

Postscript: I did a reinstallation of IE8, and now I can see some of the features that were missing above.

In order to enable the InPrivate Blocking of ads, you first have to enable InPrivate Browsing (from the menu bar, select Tools, then InPrivate Browsing). Only after that can you turn on ad blocking (from the menu bar, select Tools, then InPrivate Blocking).

I found a number of reassuring things. For one, starting up InPrivate Browsing opens up an entire new window. Not only is it NOT ON by default but it’s also more of a "special use" behavior. Then, the actual third party site blocking within the new window also has to be enabled. That’s two steps to jump through in order to block ads or other third party content.

I surfed to probably 30 or so different sites, with more than 10 of them carrying AdSense, and didn’t find that any AdSense units were blocked. Heck, I didn’t see if any ads were blocked. I can’t tell if other third party scripts such as Google Analytics or Quantcast were blocked, however.

In general, I don’t see too much to worry about that the blocking will wipe out internet advertising or valuable tracking services, not as implemented. Instead, the tools require several hoops to jump through but for those who want an added level of privacy, they can get it.

I would like to see the tools show you everything that’s blocked, however. There’s supposed to be visual representation of content that’s removed on pages, but tracking services like Google Analytics have no visual cues that would get replaced. Nothing within the InPrivate settings window seems to provide this type of display.

For more about how the two services work, see these two posts from Microsoft:

• IE8 and Privacy
• Privacy Beyond Blocking Cookies: Bringing Awareness to Third-Party Content

As for visual search, well, I still can’t get that to work as described.

So Firefox 3 has a new release candidate making news, suggesting that the browser is nearly done. May I suggest that the browser is nowhere near being done until the Mozilla Foundation drops its favoritism to Google and allow users to pick their own default search engine? And that Microsoft ought to be among those choices?

Seriously, the entire Firefox+Google love fest is a joke. Let’s revisit a little history here. Google fought and fought to pressure Microsoft so that no search provider was the default in Internet Explorer 7, arguing this was the best for consumer choice:

"The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services," said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google. "We don’t think it’s right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose."

Google got what it wanted. Internet Explorer has no default search engine. If you upgraded to it, IE used whatever search choice was already established on your computer. If you did a fresh install of XP or Vista, then you had to choose your search provider. The choice was only made for you in cases where the computer maker itself cut a deal (see these here).

If Google’s all for choice, as I’ve said before, then Google should be pressuring Firefox to ensure there’s consumer choice in that browser, as well.

Instead, Google’s been quite happy to buy out the idea of consumer choice. As the New York Times pointed out toward the end of last year, 85 percent of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google. In return for that, Google’s what you get as your search provider for most versions of Firefox.

Let’s talk specifics. If you download a fresh copy of Firefox, by default it will be Google search that you’ll use if you search using Firefox’s built-in search box. Using a drop-down option (as shown in the screenshot at the top of this article), you can then access these resources:

• Google (default)
• Yahoo
• Amazon
• Answers.com
• Creative Commons
• eBay
• Wikipedia (in Firefox 3, not Firefox 2)

It makes sense for Google to be among the options. It’s the world’s most popular search engine, well used and well respected. Similarly, Yahoo is an excellent Google alternative that should be included. And similarly, Microsoft Live Search is an excellent alternative — but it doesn’t make the list.

Why not? Again, Google has the deal to be the default search provider in most markets where Firefox is distributed, except for in some Asian markets, where Yahoo has a similar deal. It’s not clear if such deals also prevent Microsoft from being listed at all or if this happens because of the Firefox-Internet Explorer rivalry.

I don’t care in either case — Microsoft is a good search engine that searchers should have access to directly from that search bar. By not offering it, Firefox is failing its users out of either financial reasons or spite.

Yes, there’s an option to add other search engines. At the end of the drop-down box, there’s a Manage Search Engines choice that eventually leads you to this page. There, you can find Live Search among the other 23 choices. But as there aren’t that many choices, why not add them all to the search box? Firefox could learn a lesson here from Groowe. My long-time browsing companion, it lets me search from any of the major search engines or specialty search engines, with them easily grouped into categories.

Let’s go back to those other search choices. If you can’t include them all, why not list the more popular ones? Do that many people do Creative Commons searches that it needs to be right in the search box itself? And is Amazon there only because Firefox probably earns off of affiliate searches? Is that the same for eBay? If you go by download popularity, the choices would look more like this:

• Ask.com
• Google
• Live Search
• Yahoo
• Answers.com
• Flickr
• Creative Commons
• Merriam-Webster
• IMDB
• Wikipedia
• Weather Channel
• Amazon
• eBay

I submit that search is an important part of the browser development process that shouldn’t be left as a choice made based on how much money Mozilla can earn. It should be done in a way that best benefits the user. That means:

• Let the user make the initial search choice
• Provide a variety of search tools right within the box

Fix it, Firefox. And Google, help them fix it by ensuring that any provisions of the secret contract between you and Firefox are altered to allow for the consumer choice you’re so happy to espouse should happen in Internet Explorer.

Here’s a tutorial and some screens.

I haven’t used it so I can’t report on the experience. Conceptually, however, I could imagine that in many use cases (e.g., Travel and Local Search) this could be highly valuable as an option. Microsoft Messenger has had collaboration capabilities around local search and Live Maps for some time, but they’re little used.

Indeed, collaboration is widely available in various online applications; however, it has yet to come to search. The key to mainstreaming this or gaining decent consumer adoption is bundling the option into the browser and not having several “hoops” for users to jump through.

This is very early and will undoubtedly evolve.

Of the $66 million in revenue reported by Mozilla, 85 percent of that came from Google. But Mozilla said they made sure Google “understood the separation between a search relationship and the rest of our activities.” That may suggest that Mozilla is aware of why Google may want them to overtake Microsoft’s claim over the browser market.

See Google: As Open As It Wants To Be (i.e., When It’s Convenient) for some links and background on Google’s deal to be the default in Firefox in most countries (in several Asia countries, it’s Yahoo).

Google’s Browser Address Error Redirector from Google Operating System and Google turns the page… in a bad way from the OpenDNS Blog cover the same issue, a "feature" called "Browser Address Error Redirector" that sends those using Dell computers and trying to reach non-existent web sites to a page loaded with ads.

This has actually been going on for nearly a year now. Interesting Consequence of Google<->Dell Deal? from Dare Obasanjo shows an earlier version of it from last year. However, I get the impression the interface may have changed and more people encountering it now.

Here’s an example of what’s happening. Let’s say you tried to reach Microsoft but failed to add the .com to the address in your browser on a new Dell computer, so that you just entered [http://microsoft]. That error would get you redirected to this page:

On my 20" monitor, the top of the screen is filled with ads, so that it looks like this:

It’s not exactly the most helpful information for someone trying to reach a pretty easy-to-identify site. Rather than provide a link to Microsoft, the Google-Dell redirection lists a bunch of ads. Indeed, many more ads at the top (since Dell doesn’t show them at the side, like Google) than if you were to do the same search at Google.

Look at this side-by-side comparison of Dell’s Google-powered results versus Google itself:

I think the better quality of the results is self-evident. Google’s results put editorial links above the fold, with a direct link to Microsoft itself the first thing on the page — as it should be.

Personally, I don’t find the ads dominating this URL error page as bad as other things Google and Dell shove onto it. In particular, look at these sections. One from the side is called Popular Categories:

And at the bottom, Popular Results:

Really? I tried to reach a non-existent site and Dell and Google have somehow come up with Popular Categories and Popular Results related to this? And somehow, things like "car rental" and "payday loans" are among the contextually relevant choices?

In reality, these Popular Categories and Popular Results seem to have little to do with the popularity of URL error activity, as they would seem to imply. Instead, the seem suspiciously like a way to get Dell searchers to perform new queries that in response bring up ad-heavy pages that generate revenue for Dell and Google.

Let me be clear. These suggestion links themselves are not paid. Actual paid links within the Dell results are flagged as "Sponsored Links," in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines on labeling. But then again, there’s an excellent case to make that though the suggestion links themselves aren’t sponsored, they are misleading in suggesting they are somehow "popular" rather than hard-coded, hand-picked choices designed to generate ad views. That’s especially the case when a search for djfdkjkjdk brings up "Popular Results" that are the same as you’d seen in the search for Microsoft above. Clearly, these are hard-coded.

Google’s Matt Cutts, in his push against those selling paid links, recently reminded people of FTC disclosure guidelines, quoting the FTC from a Washington Post article:

“The petition to us did raise a question about compliance with the FTC act,” said Mary K. Engle, FTC associate director for advertising practices. “We wanted to make clear . . . if you’re being paid, you should disclose that.”

Well, Dell seems to be inserting these links, with the cooperation of Google, for the purposes of getting paid. Shouldn’t that be disclosed?

The error page does have a What’s This link at the top to explain more about it.

This page was generated because of one of these two reasons:

• The web address you typed did not resolve correctly.
   
• You typed a keyword query in the browser address bar.

  This page is meant to provide you with helpful related content, including web search results and paid advertisements, based on the meaning of the web address/keyword query that you typed. This program can be uninstalled from the Control Panel "Add/Remove Programs" in Windows XP or "Control Panel > Program > Programs and Features" in Windows Vista. Look for the application named "Browser Address Error Redirector". Older versions may be called "GoogleAFE".

The editorial results and even the paid ads can be considered helpful content, though obviously not as helpful as they could be. The Popular Results and Popular Categories units, let’s be honest, aren’t meant to provide any helpful related content at all.

The OpenDNS article on this issue also focuses on the software application that sends people to this page, if they enter non-working URLs, and suggests it’s spyware:

This page isn’t being shown to Dell owners just because they have the Google Toolbar. In fact, uninstalling the Google Toolbar won’t get rid of it. Dell and Google are now installing a second program on computers that intercepts all sorts of queries that the browser would normally try to resolve. This program has no clear name and is very hard to uninstall. In some circles, people would call this spyware.

I wouldn’t consider it spyware, but it certainly isn’t friendlyware. But you can understand why some people would think it’s spyware, when their computers seem to be acting in a strange way. Some searches brought up plenty of people who are confused by the software and what it is doing.

One of the most ironic things in all this is to compare what’s happening to the statements Dell and Google have made about consumer choice in the past. When the deal came out in May 2006, Dell said:

Our motivation is to deliver customers tools that enable them to search and organize information quickly and easily, right out of the box…Dell customers will have the option of choosing Microsoft as their default if they prefer.

I commented then

Yep — they just have to change the defaults in IE7, right? Except Google’s argued that those defaults are too hard for mere mortals to alter. So consumers really have as much choice with the Dell deal as they have with IE7 – that is, as much or as little choice as you think they are technically capable of.

Defaults and choice are important, because Google led a loud charge last year against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 as somehow making it too difficult for mere mortals to change to another search provider from its default settings. The company even raised the issue with US and EU authorities:

Google has informed the European antitrust authorities of its worry that "Microsoft’s approach to setting search defaults in Internet Explorer 7 benefits Microsoft while taking away choice from users," said Steve Langdon, a spokesman for Google.

Google would not say specifically what it has discussed with American antitrust officials. "We have spoken to the Justice Department generally about our business and the importance of preserving competition in the search market," Mr. Langdon said.

However, despite choice, Google’s been happy to control the default settings through deals with Firefox, Dell, Adobe and others. The hypocrisy prompted me to write back in May:

Sure, I can get behind the "give people a choice from the beginning" idea. But if Google wants Microsoft to do that, then Google should make it happen right now in Firefox, which pretty much is Google’s surrogate browser. If this is the best way for a browser to behave, then Google should be putting its weight on Firefox to make it happen. And Google should also ensure it does the same with Dell, where it has a partnership that I believe makes it the default search engine on new Dell computers.

I was far from the only one raising this. Nearly a year later, those using Dell’s don’t appear to have gained any greater choice, while arguably, their search experience has gone down.