In the world of competitions, Microsoft has been attempting to promote their own search engine, and had persuaded Firefox to release a "Firefox Bing" version with Microsoft Bing pre-set as default for search.

The promotion apparently didn't get very far, but may have been what stimulated the agreement, just anounced, that Google will pay Mozilla ($300,000,000 (US)/yr?) to assure that they'll be the default search engine in Firefox releases. The agreement appears to be for the next 3 years.

John