Firefox 34 Hits North America With Yahoo As The New Default Search Engine

It looks like Mozilla has worked double time after changing its default search engine. The new Firefox 34 is now available for download on Firefox.com and after seven years it will be the first time that Google will not be the search provider.

The default search engine was changed to Yahoo for North America. With the new partnership, Yahoo promised to deliver a more enhanced search experience for long time users. Other territories like Canada are set to follow. On the other hand, users from Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan have already made the switch, this time to Yandex. Mozilla notes that American users who are not as comfortable with Yahoo as their search engine have the liberty to change the search bar back to Google and same applies to its users in Russia, ITPro Portal reports.

The biggest addition for the desktop platforms is Firefox Hello, which is a new Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) calling feature that is supported by Spanish carrier Telefonica. Looking back, Mozilla first introduced via Firefox 33 beta an experimental WebRTC feature that allows users to make free voice and video calls without the hassle of downloading additional software or plug-ins and without the need to create a separate account.

Now that the company has partnered with Telefonica, users will be provided with what it calls as "the first global communications system built directly into a browser". Firefox Hello is powered by the OpenTok real-time communications platform called TokBox, which is a Telefonica company, Tech Spot reports.

The next big change with Firefox 34 is the new search bar which Mozilla first unveiled last week. To illustrate, when a user types a term or phrases in the Firefox search box, a list of suggestions will update with each character. In addition, a new set of fancy buttons below these suggestions will let the user choose which search engine the user would want to send the query to. The improvement in the search bar will help users easily search within third-parties like Amazon, Twitter or Wikipedia to name a few. This will indeed help save time when searching for results in a specific site.

The Firefox 34 will be the last update for this year. Apparently, newer versions are released approximately every six weeks, so expect that the Firefox 35 might be out in mid-January of next year.