New Search Options Coming Soon in Firefox

As covered here a few days ago, there is momentous news on the Mozilla front, as the company has moved away from its longstanding deal with Google, which has historically subsidized more than 90 percent of Mozilla's revenues, to the tune of more than $300 million per year at times. Instead, Yahoo and Mozilla have announced a "strategic five-year partnership" agreement which will make Yahoo the primary search option for Firefox.

As part of its partnership with Yahoo, Mozilla and Yahoo engineers are going to overhaul various aspects of search in the Firefox browser. And now, Mozilla is showing off the upcoming search interface for Firefox, which has an improved search suggestion scheme and a new "array of buttons" below search suggestions in the search box. Here is a look.

According to a Mozilla UX blog post:

 "When typing a search term into the Firefox search box, you will notice two new things: first, we improved the design of search suggestions to make them look a lot more organized. And second: there is an array of buttons below your search suggestions. These buttons allow you to find your search term directly on a specific site quickly and easily."

The screeshot here shows the search suggestions and array of buttons in action.

And in the following shot, you can see what kinds of choice Mozilla is going to offer in terms of search engines that users can select as defaults.

Mozilla's post adds the following:

"But you shouldn’t be limited to any default set we provide. That’s why adding additional search engines is easy. Are you a web developer? Then how about adding MDN and Stack Overflow to your one click searches? Writing a paper and looking up synonyms every day? Add a dictionary site! Just click on the magnifying glass in the search field while on the site and select the search engine you’d like to add."

The new search interface for Firefox looks good and Mozilla does appear to be pursuing a strategy that emphasizes choices for users. You'll see all of this arrive in Firefox very soon.