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07 October 2010, 13:08

Firefox 4 to add Bing and remove Creative Commons search

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Firefox 4 Logo The Mozilla Project has announced that the next major release of its open source Firefox web browser, version 4.0, will include an option for Microsoft's Bing search engine. Discussing the announcement, Mozilla Vice President of Products Jay Sullivan said, "Bing itself offers a user experience that we think users will find valuable, and with its significant rise in popularity over the last year, we will also be including Bing as a general search option for English language users".

According to the announcement post on the official Mozilla Blog, Google will remain the default search option in the browser, followed by alternatives Yahoo! and Bing. Sullivan says that, "As always, Firefox will continue to provide users with complete control over their list of search engines, with access to a large gallery of search plug-ins and the ability to change the default search engine at any time". Other built-in search options include Amazon and eBay for shopping and Wikipedia. However, the Answers.com and Creative Commons search engines are being removed. Sullivan commented "The Creative Commons search engine has changed over the years from one focused on locating CC licensed materials to one focused on providing a general search from Google, Yahoo! and others".

Firefox 4 is the non-profit organisation's next-generation web browser based on version 2.0 of the Gecko rendering platform – the Firefox 3.6 branch uses Gecko 1.9.2 – and features a new Add-ons Manager and extension management API. Other changes include a new 'tabs on top' layout, the integration of Firefox Sync, formerly known as Weave, and various new features aimed at web developers.

The current development release of Firefox 4 is the sixth beta published on the 14th of September. Firefox 4.0 Beta 7, scheduled to be released in the "2nd half of September", has yet to be released, while the first release candidate is scheduled to arrive in the second half of October. A final release date for Firefox 4, however, has not been announced. The latest stable release of Firefox is version 3.6.10 from mid-September.

Firefox binaries are released under the Mozilla Firefox End-User Software License Agreement and the source code is released under disjunctive tri-licensing that includes the Mozilla Public Licence, GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1.

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(crve)

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