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Live Search: A Firefox Extension from Microsoft

Even Microsoft can't ignore the power of Mozilla's Firefox browser anymore. The company has released a Firefox extension called Live Search that is designed to deliver fast results and suggestion based on Microsoft's search engine from within Firefox. The extension was written by the Live Search team at Microsoft.  What's surprising here is that Microsoft doesn't deliver more extensions for Firefox that could benefit it and everybody else.

If there is one fundamental reason to love the Firefox browser, it has to be the galaxy of useful extensions for it, as we've written before. The Live Search extension isn't all that exciting. It just delivers suggestions from Live Search as you type terms in the Firefox-resident search bar that it installs, then does searches. Still, though, those searches are going to Microsoft's engine and some people may appreciate an easy way to add Live Search to the many other ways to run searches right from the browser.

Microsoft delivers applications for platforms that it competes with, and it would be foolish not to. It's a member of the Apache Foundation and has its own open source project repository, CodePlex. It has an ongoing partnership with Novell. It delivers the Microsoft Office suite for the Mac. Why not deliver useful Firefox extensions that it and others can benefit from, whether the benefits for Microsoft come in the form of search traffic or anything else? 

• firefox
• Microsoft
• Live Search

by Peter Brook on Jan. 30, 2009

Haha - it is amazing to see Microsoft contributing extensions to Firefox! The browser wars are back on, and this time MS is in 'embrace' mode.....

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