Microsoft has announced today that the Bing team and Mozilla Firefox have now teamed up to offer better Bing integration in Mozilla’s Firefox browser. This is Microsoft’s attempt to boost Bing’s market share.
Microsoft, since the first release of its search engine Bing, has been hard at work to make it a viable search engine, and with continuous improvement and new features, a deal with Research In Motion to make Bing the default search engine for Blackberry, and even a release of a Bing app for the iOS devices (iPad, iPhone) to help gain market share, the Bing team and Firefox are now teaming to offer better Bing integration for Firefox users.
Although Bing is already one of the search options in Firefox, the Bing team at Microsoft is teaming with Firefox to bring even better options and deeper integration to “make it even easier to use Bing in Firefox.”
“So today we’re teaming with Mozilla to release Firefox with Bing, a version of the popular Web browser that includes default search settings for Bing. Now Firefox users who are Bing enthusiasts can use Firefox with Bing to use the Web the way they want without having to take extra steps to navigate or customize their settings to Bing,” wrote Tor Steiner on the Bing team community website.
These changes will make it easier for users to search using the search bar, customize and change their setting to a better search experience.
“Firefox with Bing offers the latest version of Firefox with Bing set as your home page and the default setting in the search box and AwesomeBar (where you can also type in queries as well as Web addresses). If you already have the latest version of Firefox, then you just need to download the Bing Search for Firefox Add-on to set the same preferences.”
Since it was released, Bing has been getting market share which is estimated at more than 14.4%. With recent news that Bing is now powering Yahoo’s search engine worldwide, which was part of 10 year deal that Microsoft announced last year, Bing and Yahoo market share combined is now at 29%. Microsoft is also expected to introduce a HTML5 version of Bing.
Bing is also trying to get the social edge with recently-announced deal with Twitter, a deal which started almost 2 years ago.
You can download the new Firefox with bing here.