Firefox
A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
Pass. Qwant has had its share of controversies, regardless their results aren't better than DDG.
If Mozilla was serious about this they would run their own Searx instance and let people choose what engines they wanted to use.
Wtf is Qwant?
Edit: oh, OK, it's a search engine. Next questions, what is the nature of the "partnership" and how is this better or different than DDG?
how is this better or different than DDG?
Qwant is using its own index ~~plus Bing~~. If I remember DDG only using Bing's index and DDG started to censored results in 2022.
Sometimes better search results than DDG (but about the same), EU based (France), offers a Openstreetmap based alternative to google maps (opposed to ddg using Apple Maps) and a slightly worse privacy policy are the main differences
what is the nature of the “partnership”
The partnership is entirely of monetary nature. Like all "partnerships" Mozilla has with 3rd parties that are integrated into Firefox.
That is their business concept. Those companies pay high amounts of money, and Mozilla adds their links into the browser or sends them "anonymized" usage statistics for advertisement purposes.
Too bad about the choice for qwant. I've been using them for many years and they have big flaws: they block visits from unsupported countries, so if you're traveling, you're fucked. They also started blocking ad blocking users and their main webpage is full of crap that you have to disable manually. Their support is non existing. And they use the same censorship as Microsoft. I moved to brave search recently
There's no way Mozilla is replacing Google as the default, so what are they actually announcing here? I didn't read any actual results thats happening. Are they just adding Qwant as an option in the search engine settings?
This part of the post suggests that Qwant will not become the default search engine, but given the millions that Mozilla gets from Google it should not surprise anyone.
Did you know you could choose the search engine of your choice right from your Firefox URL bar?
This means Google isn't paying the millions to be the default anymore??
Seems to be an awful news then, that money was useful for development and a default is trivial to change
I didn't see a line that suggests they're putting Qwant as default, only that they're making it available as a search provider, just as DuckDuckGo and others are.
They say:
Did you know you could choose the search engine of your choice right from your Firefox URL bar?
Has anyone here used Qwant? I've seen it mentioned a handful of times but I've not tried it myself.
I had used it for a while in the past. The results were surprisingly good. I have moved to other search engines to experiment since then, but I have nothing bad to say about my time with Qwant.
I’ve been experimenting with other search engines recently so might give it a go.
I've used it a long time now. I find it to have much more relevant results than DDG did last time I tried.
I would love to but it's still unavailable in my country :/
Isn't Qwant glorified Bing?
Isn't Duckduckgo?