Due to the Russia-Ukraine war, many companies are banning Russian IT services. And it seems the sanctions are growing day by day. Mozilla also decided to remove the Yandex Search, Mail.ru, and OK.ru services from its popular web browser. With the new Firefox version, users are being pointed to google.com.
Affected users in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Turkey will use Google
Preventing Russian state media
Since 2014, Mozilla has made Yandex the default search engine in Russia. The three websites were the most popular ones in Russia, have over a hundred million users per month. Mozilla released the new version, Firefox 98.0.1, and announced that they removed Yandex and Mail.ru providers from the browser’s drop-down search menu.
The release note mentions:
« Yandex and Mail.ru have been removed as optional search providers in the drop-down search menu in Firefox.
If you previously installed a customized version of Firefox with Yandex or Mail.ru, offered through partner distribution channels, this release removes those customizations, including add-ons and default bookmarks. Where applicable, your browser will revert back to default settings, as offered by Mozilla. All other releases of Firefox remain unaffected by the change. »
The default search provider is reset to Google. That means, with the new release, the affected users in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Turkey will directly use Google as the main search provider. Although there is no official statement from Mozilla, it is considered the removal decision is made to prevent Russian state media from spreading information regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.