Microsoft Making a Big Push for Firefox With Bing Integration

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The competition for web browser dominance is an interesting one, as relationships among the players might come into light as strange. In a twist of events, Microsoft has recently announced support for Firefox, albeit a release with Bing as the default search engine.

The Bing Team has announced that they have been working closely with Mozilla for a special variant of Firefox that ships with Bing as the default search option. Firefox with Bing uses Microsoft’s search technology instead of Google’s, which is the default option otherwise.

This particular release will launch with the Firefox with Bing homepage as the default. Users can also do Bing search queries right from the search box. The AwesomeBar (which supports both search queries and URLs) will also support Bing search by default. Bing search as the default search engine is possible in other variants of Firefox, although the user will have to enable the setting. This new launch negates the need to tinker with the settings and provides easier access to the #2 search engine.

How will this affect Google’s relationship with Firefox? Mozilla’s browser was originally conceived as helping fight against the dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Now, they’re partnering with Microsoft. Mozilla says the Bing-customized version is just one of the many specialized Firefox releases that the company has worked on. There are about 20 customized Firefox versions that partners distribute, including Twitter and Yahoo!, which means Microsoft isn’t a special case. What’s important about this development, though, is that it seems Microsoft is looking into partnerships to further boost Bing‘s visibility and mindshare.