Canonical has canned its plans to make Yahoo! the default search engine in Mozilla Firefox in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
At the time, it said the deal with Yahoo! would provide additional revenue that would go towards the continued funding of the Ubuntu platform.
However, users weren’t impressed by the news (just read the comments under the article linked in the opening for proof of that).
The upcoming Lucid Lynx release continue to ship with Google set as the default search engine in the Firefox, which is Ubuntu’s default web browser.
Why the the switch-ahoo on choice of default search engine?
In a post to the Ubuntu mailing list Rick Spencer from the Ubuntu Desktop team says the decision was made based on “user experience, user preferences, and costs and benefits for Ubuntu and the browsers and other projects that make up Ubuntu”.
Or to put it another way, they found most users were manually switching their search engine back to Google anyway, so why fight the tide…