Yandex Partnership for Search Services

In October, we asked for feedback on creating a deeper partnership with Yandex, one in which we would make Yandex search features the default  in our Firefox Russian language builds.  Over the past few months, we have listened to feedback, talked with our localizers, studied the trends of our Firefox Yandex builds, and reviewed the Yandex user experience.  All this activity led us to the conclusion that our Russian users really wanted direct access to the Yandex search services in official Firefox RU builds.  As a result, we’re planning on setting Yandex as the default search provider for the Firefox 3.1 Russian locale builds (these changes should go into the current beta for testing). This means that, upon download and launch, the Firefox Start Page for RU locale builds will use Yandex for search queries, and the search bar will default to Yandex.  Implementation details are in bug #471561 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=471561).

Thanks for the help.