Old News

Ubuntu was going to rely on Microsoft as the default search engine for 10.04.

Let’s review the rationale:

Why?
I am pursuing this change because Canonical has negotiated a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and this revenue will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform. This change will help provide these resources as well as continuing to respect our user’s default search across Firefox.

New News

Apparently the “underlying circumstances can change unpredictably” because now we learn that Google will retain its place as the default. Also worth noting is that the rationale is quite different:

In this case, choosing Google will be familiar to everybody upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 and the change will only be visible to those who have been part of the development cycle for 10.04.

So I guess familiarity is a high priority now? I don’t know how to reconcile that with the button movement, but whatever.

I’d also like to point out the now-expanded criteria for selecting the defaults:

Each release we determine the best default web browser and the best default search engine for Ubuntu. When choosing the best default search provider, we consider factors such as user experience, user preferences, and costs and benefits for Ubuntu and the browsers and other projects that make up Ubuntu.

Perhaps it is just me, but I never saw where “user experience” or “user preferences” came into play in the first decision to switch to Yahoo!

In any case, having Google as the default search engine is the best option, so I welcome the change. Whatever the convoluted dance-stepping offered to un-justify and then re-justify it.

Oh, that’s not how the announcement puts it of course, relying on the one-thin-step-of-seperation of saying that the default search provider will be Yahoo! But the fact of the matter is that Yahoo! is powered by Microsoft Bing (or an un-branded Microsoft back-end, depending on whose hair-splitting you care to accept).

If that wasn’t offensive enough for you, don’t worry – there’s more: it appears that upgrades will have the default changed to Yahoo!, even if the user has set it to something else. How helpful.

Even better, Yahoo! apparently doesn’t work with Konqueror correctly, so this is something that will happen in Ubuntu, but not in Kubuntu.

Sigh, one disappointing decision after another from Canonical.