Yahoo promoting IE7
A while ago I mentioned Yahoo’s customised IE7. Now a blog posting linked to from Slashdot is mentioning that Yahoo is promoting IE7 at the bottom of search pages if you view the site in Firefox or an older version of IE (see here).
I still don’t see how promoting IE7 can be in the long term interests of Yahoo, with Microsoft pusing their Windows Live Search promoting IE is just supporting a feirce rival. Then again some people would say if they’re supporting Firefox they’d support Google but that’s not quite the same. Both Yahoo and Google are in the search drop down list in Firefox. Google may be the default in Europe and the US, but Yahoo is the default in most of Asia. For each Firefox localisation they pick the most popular search engine for each area and it happens to be Google in most of the west and Yahoo in most of Asia.
Even if they felt unsure of Firefox then they could partner with Opera, it’s a much smaller download and a more trustworthy partner than Microsoft. Their special edition of IE7 is almost 17MB to download (even though according to the system requirements you need 12MB of disk space - is this the first app that takes up less space than its installer?), why encourage Firefox users to download that massive browser when to get them to default to Yahoo all they need to do is select Yahoo on Firefox’s drop down.
What’s also odd is the ads don’t appear if you’re using Opera or Safari but appear on Firefox even if you’re using Mac or Linux.
UPDATE: What are Google thinking? Thanks to Blake for spotting this.