
Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox - jonastern
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/12/yahoo-starts-prompting-chrome-users-to-upgrade-to-firefox/
======
dochtman
Seems like that has no doubt been an important part of the deal that Yahoo!
and Mozilla made. It's an interesting way to get back at Google's heavy
promotion of Chrome on their properties.

~~~
bonzoT
agreed. the term upgrade also brings with it a connotation of being better. I
am doubtful that this is this case.

~~~
frabcus
I've been using Firefox again recently - I stopped when it was slower and less
stable than Chrome.

These days it often feels faster than Chrome.

~~~
b-ryan
I've been using Firefox for several months and have no regrets. On Ubuntu
Chrome was doing all sorts of weird things, plus being slow. Firefox's tab
groups is also a great feature.

~~~
smtddr
On my Linux MINT machine, chrome keeps doing something[1] that ends up locking
up my whole machine and I have to hard-reboot. It got to a point where I
actually had to set up Ctrl+Alt+K to issue "pkill -9 chrome" so as soon as I
see the mouse-pointer movement become non-smooth or music start to skip, I
slam on those keys to kill chrome before I have to restart my whole machine.
Then I just went to Firefox developer edition[2]. Is it better? I dunno, but I
like its cool dark theme, my system hasn't locked up since and now I got all
those cool extensions back again.

1\.
[http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2203672](http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2203672)

2\. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox/Developer_Editio...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox/Developer_Edition)

~~~
Mikeb85
Hate to say it, but Linux Mint is a buggy mess.

Chrome works fine on the vast majority of Linux distros. Even if a page hangs,
Chrome doesn't crash...

~~~
barbs
I'm running Linux Mint and I don't have this problem. Chrome runs pretty well
for me.

~~~
674266966223478
How is that relevant? It doesn't matter if it works for you. It doesn't work
for somebody else, which means there is a problem of some sort.

~~~
barbs
The discussion is about Google Chrome not working on Linux Mint. I said that
Google Chrome works for me on Linux Mint. How is that not relevant?

I'm not saying there's no problem, I'm just offering my experience to
demonstrate that perhaps the problem isn't just "Chrome runs poorly on Linux
Mint", and to offer a counterexample to "Linux Mint is a buggy mess".

------
joelthelion
Given the number of times Google has prompted me to "upgrade" to Chrome, this
is only fair game.

~~~
smosher_
No kidding. (How is this even news?)

~~~
fiberloptic
You are commenting on 'nothing'?

~~~
helperdev
LOL! Down voted because nerds.

------
bobajeff
Good for Mozilla. They need some promotion from websites. I've heard that
Google use to do this for them but I guess that changed once they made their
own browser.

I'm still not going to use Yahoo search as it's really just Google search only
not as good. Hopefully one day there will be a challenge to Google.

~~~
danw3
I've just started using duckduckgo.com. Don't have any complaints so far.

~~~
toxican
I have but one, and it's that it consistently fails to find me what I need as
well as Google does. I made a serious effort this week to use DuckDuckGo and
made it my default search engine. I wasted so much time googling stuff I'd
just DDG'd to find what I actually wanted. I love and support DDG fully, but
Google still does search better, imo.

Apparently !g is a thing though? I may have to give that a try so I can have
the benefits of DDG, but the results of google.

~~~
iopq
Yeah, I usually search with DDG and then add !g to it when I don't find
anything good in my first search results

------
tszming
I always joke to my friends that why Chrome didn't bring extension support to
Android - Because extension support will hurt Google's mobile ads revenue so
deeply if you can install adblock with one click.

So, please also consider support a non-profit organization like Mozilla, when
their products are actually not weaker.

~~~
thejosh
>non-profit organization

Apart from when they switch existing users settings over to Yahoo by default.

~~~
xgbi
It is still non-profit if at the end of the year they have ... no profit. If
this move allows them to keep afloat, then I don't see the problem.

------
alexbardas
Makes a lot of sense to me, Firefox is an excellent browser. I hope it will
keep its independence though.

~~~
ironmagma
Chrome doesn't even work with its own company's social network plugin
(Hangouts). I always have to switch to Firefox to use screen share.

~~~
datamatt
I haven't encountered problems with Hangouts. But the new Firefox Hello
service for in browser webcam chats is pretty awesome:
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-hello-make-
rece...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-hello-make-receive-
calls-without-account)

(disclaimer: I do actually work for mozilla)

~~~
ironmagma
Seems only tangential, since I don't see anything about group calls or screen
share (which are the main features we need Hangouts for).

~~~
dao-
I believe group calls will be in Firefox 35. Not sure about screen sharing,
but it's being worked on and coming soon.

------
cpeterso
Calling a promo banner a "prompt" is a bit of an exaggeration. Also, the same
"Upgrade to the new Firefox" message is also shown to Firefox versions less
than the current version (34).

~~~
sp332
If this isn't a prompt, what would a prompt look like?

~~~
umeshunni
I dunno, something like this:
[http://imgur.com/HNQWMBq](http://imgur.com/HNQWMBq)

~~~
cpeterso
Yes. To me, a "prompt" is UI that requires user interaction, like annoying
flyover ads.

------
ChuckMcM
Part of a more strategic move I believe for Yahoo! to get back into the search
business. When their 10 year contract with Microsoft is up I would not be
surprised to see them switch to a new index of their own making. What has
always been interesting to me about search though is that the two big players
who have a lot to gain by having their own search index (Facebook and Apple)
have so far chosen not to go there. Putting on my prognostication hat I see
Yahoo! shipping on a new index in 2016 and being bought by either Apple(most
need) or Facebook(most likely) in 2017 :-)

------
l33tbro
Too bad their shitty mail service does not play nicely at all with Firefox.
Seriously, Yahoo Mail does not even allow me to attach a PDF when I'm in
Firefox.

There's a raft of other functionality issues which drove me to the decision to
migrate 15 years worth of emails out of it.

~~~
aikah
For me it has always been about the spam filter(gmail is way better at it)
,and the fact that I didn't have to pay to read my mails in outlook with
gmail.Maybe it has changed but the "forwarding" was a paid feature in yahoo
mail.

~~~
_delirium
Oddly the lack of a decent spam-filter was the reason I left gmail. It had
_way_ too many false positives for me, including some very problematic ones.
The last straw was when it flagged an email from my landlord as spam, with the
explanation that it was flagged because it was written in Danish, a language I
don't normally communicate in. It's true that I don't normally write in
Danish. But I do _live_ in Denmark, so it doesn't seem very justified to flag
something as spam just because it's written in Danish. If anything, emails
written in Danish are the most likely to be important!

~~~
Karunamon
I've had the opposite experience - demos of hosting mail elsewhere lead to me
getting absolutely overwhelmed by spam. I think being a gmail user since it
was initially released has given it a really long time to train to the spam I
normally receive.

Very few false positives too. Maybe one or two a month.

~~~
_delirium
One or two false positives a month? You must have low standards. <1 false
positives a year is my threshold. I don't believe that throwing out non-spam
emails is acceptable.

~~~
Karunamon
Not even remotely realistic, in my experience.

------
wjoe
I don't see any such notice if I try going to Yahoo in Chrome. Perhaps because
I'm in Europe where Yahoo doesn't have the search deal with Mozilla. Or
perhaps it's just confused with the Linux user agent or something.

Happy Firefox user here though. Glad they aren't so reliant on Google funding
now, I expect the Yahoo/Baidu/Yandex deal with get them more money than Google
alone, without being too reliant on any one party.

------
wycats
Google deserves every last inch of this.

------
IgorPartola
I love me some Firefox. I do. I am really glad that it is a major browser, and
that people use it. I am very grateful for the innovation it brings. But I
cannot bring myself to use it. Chrome was late to the party, but it got a
fundamental issue right: tabs and plugins get their own process spaces. This
is huge for performance. I am lucky to own a newish top of the line computer
and I trnd not to have more than a dozen tabs open at once. I cannot do this
workflow in Firefox. It gets slower as I go, and it's memory usage creeps up.
Flash makes things worse (don't recommend that I turn it off; doing front-end
work still involves it from time to time). I fire it up periodically to check
it out, but it just does not work for me and that makes me sad.

------
sp332
This is also happening for people who have paid for Yahoo Mail in order to not
have ads. I would be asking for my money back if they start showing me ads
like that!

Edit: source
[https://twitter.com/AnthonyPAlicea/status/542670797912166400](https://twitter.com/AnthonyPAlicea/status/542670797912166400)

~~~
rohandhruva
Do you mind sharing why you still use Yahoo Mail, let alone paying to use it?
(serious question)

~~~
yuhong
I think most of the complaints are about the user interface nowadays. It
sometimes does have other problems, but that is probably because it takes a
while for Yahoo to change.

~~~
EarthLaunch
After 12+ years of service they deleted my secondary email account because I
hadn't visited it in less than a year ("username has been recycled"), then
wouldn't let me re-claim the username, and have no support contact for it. I
will never trust them with anything important.

~~~
danielweber
You made me launch my old Yahoo account to be sure it's still there.

Then I tried to respond to an email in Yahoo! Mail, and __EVERYTIME I HIT THE
LETTER 'i' IT POPS UP A CHAT DIALOG BOX WTF __. Sorry, but it 's really
frustrating.

------
danielweber
"Chrome" in headline.

Doesn't appear at all in the article.

------
kasabali
Now this started to look like a fair play.

------
ender89
I don't see a problem with this, its what google has been doing for years.

------
awalton
Ok. Google prompts me to "Upgrade to Chrome" all of the time.

------
gordon_freeman
I just don't understand Yahoo's user acquisition strategy here. I updated my
Firefox to latest version a week ago and it took literally less than a minute
for me to set Google as default search engine. I know that if given choice
between Yahoo and Google, I'll almost always use Google for 2 main reasons:
Search quality and it is just that I'm accustomed to making specific search
queries on Google. The thing I don't understand here is: what Yahoo will gain
by this deal with Mozilla? I mean why don't they try to improve the quality of
their search product and gain users that way rather than forcing an inferior
search as default on Firefox.

~~~
eddieplan9
Being the default is a _huge_ deal. You only need to look at how many people
are still on IE (8!).

Plus, search quality is a very subjective matter. I have Bing on my phone for
a while (mostly to avoid Google's redirect links), and I hardly notice it any
more.

~~~
thawkins
The ie8 thing is because it is the last version you can run on the massive
number of pirated XP copies out there.

------
jdlyga
To give it some credit, Firefox is pretty damn good in the past few months
after the multi-process updates they've been making.

------
watwut
Funny. And google is prompting me to upgrade to chrome. I wonder what would
happen if I would use some MS service.

------
at-fates-hands
Despite the browser wars, the newest annoyance is having to use Yahoo's search
engine. I figured I would give it a few weeks and see how good it was compared
to Google.

Two weeks in and I'm done with it. Almost every search is useless to me. Even
just doing local searches was painful.

Type in pizza + your city and I got a bunch of ads and "Top 10 pizza places in
(insert your city here)" and a ton of Yelp reviews. All I wanted was a list of
pizza places near me.

I have a dozen other examples, but in a nutshell, it was just really poor at
returning results I was expecting.

~~~
Amezarak
> Despite the browser wars, the newest annoyance is having to use Yahoo's
> search engine.

Have to? Changing the default search engine in Firefox is as simple as
clicking on the search-box dropdown and selecting a different search engine.
Two clicks.

~~~
gtremper
Generally, the number of clicks isn't the issue. Its knowing which clicks to
make.

~~~
Amezarak
Sure, but in this case, we're talking about a dropdown marked on the main UI
immediately next to the search box. It's not as of it's hidden. Anyone who
realizes the search engine has changed is saavy enough to figure out how to
change it.

~~~
wutbrodo
You would be surprised. "Obvious" UI hints that are intuitive for someone like
you or me are not for a LOT of people. Some subset of those people is still
likely to be able to notice that their searches now take them to a page that
says "Yahoo" at the top instead of "Google".

------
zeruch
The odd part here is that Firefox has gone back to being my primary browser.
The fact that it now disables/disallows extensions the Play store doesnt like
and flat out locks you from doing so manually really annoyed me.

Don't try to out-Apple Apple, it doesn't win you any favor.

While they aren't packaged by default, some of the tools around FF for .js
work just as well as on Chrome, and the only thing hat Chrome has that I can
see FF doesn't is process isolation.

~~~
wanderingstan
> The fact that it now disables/disallows the Play store doesnt like...

I assume here you're referring to Chrome, not Firefox?

~~~
zeruch
correct

------
jrochkind1
Google certainly did the same thing to promote Chrome on web search and other
places.

I'm not sure if Google used the misleading "upgrade" terminology -- I'm also
not sure if most people know the difference between "upgrading" and
"switching" anyway, and those who do are obviously the ones who won't be
misled anyway.

It still makes them look sleazy to those who do know the difference.

------
debacle
Firefox also automatically updated my default search on every device to Yahoo,
even though I deselected that option.

I was pretty pissed about that.

------
john2x
Why isn't Google facing the same issues Microsoft faced back in the Windows +
IE dominant days?

~~~
moonshinefe
An even bigger example would be Apple.

------
pwr22
No different than when Google was telling me to upgrade to chrome whenever I
visited their sites

------
huhtenberg
Not just Chrome users. I am on Firefox and I got this message too. I'm
guessing they show it to everyone who's not using FF34.

------
avodonosov
I don't see that "Upgrade to the new Firefox" link... ah, wait, I am already
on the Firefox!

------
skrowl
Chrome to Firefox is a large upgrade. No one that cares about their privacy
should still be using Chrome.

------
stephengoodwin
Tomorrow's headline: Google Starts Prompting Yahoo Mail Users to "Upgrade" to
Gmail.

------
preillyme
Given that Firefox now uses Yahoo as its default search engine, this move
doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Yahoo clearly wants as many people as
possible to use Firefox — and with it its search engine (which is powered by
Microsoft Bing).

------
Istof
I love Firefox but it is unusable on my Android phone because it uses close to
100% CPU (I tried the latest version less then 2 weeks ago) ...

edit: downvote me, but Firefox is still way too CPU intensive on Android

~~~
gtk40
Interesting. I use it as a daily driver on a lower powered phone (Moto G first
gen) and in fact, it's about the only browser that works well on my older
Android tablet (Dell Streak 7 on HC).

~~~
Brakenshire
Works well on my old Android phone as well.

------
ryanSrich
So long as no one is promoting IE I have no gripes (for those saying newer IE
is better than older IE, I agree, still please avoid using IE).

------
junto
Next we'll have Microsoft pushing IE down our throats when we visit Bing...
:-)

------
tedsmith
I don’t think that Apple will follow Firefox. They will renew the contract
with Google (as default search engine in Safari). Maybe they get a better
price...

------
gcb0
if techcrunch thinks my favorite browser should be scorned with quotes on
'upgrade'... i'm on the right path!

thanks for the confirmation, techcrunch!

------
WorldWideWayne
I'd really like someone to come along and make a Webkit/Blink based browser
that doesn't suck. I'd pay for it.

Neither Chrome nor Firefox respects my operating system. Both of them take up
the whole title-bar with their tabs, rendering useless the window functions
that depend on that area. They have non-standard menu systems and very poor
keyboard acceleration. Chrome gives you zero control over things like HTML5
video auto-play and I just can't stand to use Firefox because they keep
changing the UI and it gets worse every time.

~~~
stealthascope
Using MATE [1] I don't have this problem at all.

1: [http://mate-desktop.org/](http://mate-desktop.org/)

------
ivanca
If Google decides to respond, they should just delete all Yahoo and Mozilla
results from their search engine; and if they do it would be just fair (...
and Mozilla complaining would be extremely hypocritical)

------
smegel
That's funny, it's been years since I used either of them.

~~~
yournemesis
I don't get it.

------
LukeFitzpatrick
Unfortunately I stopped using Firefox a few years ago, found it to be more of
a distraction than a benefit.

But it's good that Yahoo is doing something to compete with Google, if they
don't than who will? I'm personally a big fan of Google, they lead the way of
change.

------
j_baker
My first question: is this intentional or is it a bug? This wouldn't be the
first time a website has mistakenly prompted a user to upgrade their browser.

~~~
pconner
It sounds like intentional marketing-language to me. It's not uncommon for
physical products to be referred to as "The New *" whenever they get some sort
of change. In this case, it's a newer version of Firefox, and people viewing
this ad on other browsers might not have tried Firefox since its last couple
of upgrades.

------
RemoteWorker
ITT: If Google does it it's ok, if Yahoo does it it's not.

~~~
mmanfrin
What are you talking about? There is maybe 1 total critical comment:

[http://i.imgur.com/8cI6hCW.png](http://i.imgur.com/8cI6hCW.png)

Hell, there are more comments in _favor_ of this _because_ Google did the
same. Quit playing the false victim card.

------
DoubleMalt
That would probably make me stop using Yahoo.

Although I grudgingly accept a similar prompt on mobile Workflowy (I use
firefox there and are prompted to use Chrome for it) even though it annoys the
crap out of me. There is not even a possibility to turn this off.

But for Yahoo I have alternatives for workflowy not (yet).

~~~
rhino369
Yep, exactly. Google would never sink so low as to advertise.

~~~
gcb0
lol.

~~~
gcb0
lol at your downvotes.

just go to google.com on any browser other than chrome and you see a huge
banner asking to install google chrome and experience a faster web or
something.

then came back here and tell me how that is not advertising.

