Firefox drops Google as default search engine, signs five-year deal with Yahoo
By comparison, only 10 percent of web searches are made through Yahoo, as Google and to a lesser extent Bing have made major gains in recent years. Nonetheless, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said search traffic is still a major priority for the network, and one they expect to explore through the new partnership. "At Yahoo, we believe deeply in search – it’s an area of investment, opportunity and growth for us," said Mayer. "I can’t wait to see what innovations we build together."
So...this is kind of good news, bad news event.
firefox needs to realize that Yahoo is a lead balloon
and that smart users have gone over to Start Page or one of the other search engines which do not track or keep user's info.
So says I, anyhow, FWIW.
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(or downy soft)yahoo on firefox... It keeps saying the security certificate is not valid even though the url is https://www.google.com.
Yahoo dropped their email alerts - I'm sure I wasn't the only customer who spent countless hours trying to figure out what was wrong and how to fix this on my own. I was desperate to fix it on my own because of Yahoo's LEGENDARY 2 hour phone wait time for customer service.
After a month went by, and I was desperate to get back this fundamental service (my Yahoo email being the oldest - everything is tied to it) - I bit the bullet and waited 2 hours. The customer service rep did not seem to be informed of any problem. She gave me a tech support ticket. No one ever followed up on this ticket.
A month later I randomly googled again instead of calling Yahoo. This time I followed a breadcrumb trail to an announcement that indicated that something had broke, and Yahoo had decided alerts was not one of their "core" features going forward. They had not warned anyone of this risk beforehand or made any announcement after it happened. Yahoo seems unaware that this alert feature was one of THE core features for their traditional user base.
I used Firefox x-notifier to replace the email alerts. Then I realized that Calendar alerts no longer work either, and x-notifier doesn't address that - my life is now a disorganized shambles. 
My guess is Yahoo's new core business, for which they are abandoning their traditional base wholesale is "mobile" - good luck with that bit of book cooking Ms. Mayer.
Meanwhile...my Mom got locked out of her Yahoo account of 15 years. It's probably because of that danged SMS security nag screen Yahoo always inserts these days. I don't know why they assume everyone has a cellphone. I don't. My mom doesn't. At any rate, she got confused and was locked out of her account. And she couldn't get the spelling/capitalization right for the second security question. She did the two hour wait time to customer service TWICE and instead of finding an alternative means into her account, they had her set up a new account!!!!! A 15 year account filled with correspondence with family members gone just like that! I can't believe it!!!!! Seriously, when an elderly customer is involved, you'd think Yahoo customer service would do a little more hand-holding.
Lead balloon does not begin to describe it.
But what's really interesting about this is I thought something like 80% of Firefox's funding came from Google because of ad referral. I've been wondering why Google didn't just ditch Firefox after they started developing Chrome. Maybe they finally did. So maybe this is an act of desperation on Firefox's part, not Yahoo's.
with startpage and then google. In preferences I only let web sites I want to put a cookie on my machine with Google set for Don't allow. DU is the only one I set to allow. The rest I use that I let put a cookie on my computer is set for allow for this session only. I really don't have any problems with this set up either. Once in a while I will have to let someone put a cookie on my computer and in those cases when I do I usually delete them soon as I leave their page.
Fuck a bunch of tracking or whatever else they think they need a window into my world through which to look 
I go as far as to remove bing completely. About:config then type in bing and change any reference to startpage or duckduckgo. I don't do microshaft since I switched to Linux a few years ago.
DDG is my second choice only because its servers are headquartered in the U.S. They do have a Tor hidden service, which is nice.
Also, ducks are cute. But IxQuick is in the Netherlands, so points for being in the EU.
No need to go to about:config, just delete all the search engines you don't want by going to the search bar menu (little arrow next to the favicon or search engine logo), select Manage Search Engines, and delete the ones you don't need (just select it and hit delete on your keyboard).
I delete the big corporate companies from the default list (including Amazon and eBay) and just leave Wikipedia from that list. You can find more search engine plugins, including Duck Duck Go, IxQuick, Start Page, and even specialty sites like PirateBay and Vimeo, at this website: Mycroft Project. Or, make any site's search function into a search engine plugin by downloading the Mozilla add-on Add to Search Bar.
To be very meta, I added Mycroft Project and Mozilla Addons themselves as search bar plugins in Firefox. I don't use any other browser than Firefox and never will.
