Microsoft and Mozilla have announced a special release of Firefox that integrates with the Bing search engine. The build, which is called Firefox with Bing, is available for users to download from a Microsoft-hosted website.
When Firefox 4 was released last year, it added Bing as one of the available options in the browser's built-in search box. Google remained the default, but Bing became easily accessible to users who prefer Microsoft's search engine. Microsoft and Mozilla also took the opportunity to establish a revenue-sharing agreement around the search integration.
The new "Firefox with Bing" browser sets Bing as the default search engine and comes with Bing configured as the start page. These changes are tied to the special version of the browser and won't impact the current defaults in regular Firefox releases. Users can also optionally install the Bing Search for Firefox add-on to get the same features in a regular Firefox build.
Mozilla has previously released a number of similarly customized Firefox builds in collaboration with various partners. For example, they released a special version of Firefox with Twitter integration earlier this year. Mozilla has been expanding its relationships with commercial partners over the past year, leading to some unexpected tie-ins. The release of Firefox with Bing is merely the latest development.
