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Mozilla Firefox will soon show a pop-up advertisement about the Perplexity Search Engine in the address bar to users as an experiment. This is being targeted for the Firefox 139 release.
While some partnership or revenue deal should be required between Mozilla and the search engine maker for it to become one of the search engines in Firefox. As you know, Google itself pays some hectic amount to Mozilla for it to become the default search engine.
Mozilla is preparing to show a callout regarding Perplexity when Firefox is in Search Mode. In case you don’t know, Firefox already supports the Perplexity AI chatbot in the sidebar.
There is demand from the Firefox user community to add the Perplexity Search Engine to the Mozilla browser.
The callout reads:
Introducing Perplexity: a new way to search in Firefox. Ask questions. Get complete, well-cited answers.
Try Perplexity or Dismiss
“This ticket is to track the consultation/review of an upcoming Search Team Callout message to promote the Perplexity search engine. @Mandy Cheang is the engineer on the project and has started a draft experiment recipe. There is a new custom action riding the trains as well as the strings. This work will be targeting Fx139, and the experiment will need an OMC engineer to field questions and review,” a message in the Perplexity Search Engine callout promotion bug reads.
Perplexity is a search engine that uses AI to give clear and well-researched answers. Instead of just showing links like regular search engines, it gathers information from different sources and presents it in a simple, chat-like format. Users can also ask follow-up questions to get more details.
Perplexity was recently in the news for making a browser named Comet, a rival to Chrome.
With Chrome’s future at stake and the potential breaking of Google affecting Firefox’s future, Mozilla could be trying out other search engine partnerships or deals that could add some revenue. However, keep in mind, Mozilla and Perplexity have not yet publicly confirmed the financial terms or duration of this experiment.
Firefox pushing an AI-centric search engine is new. The experiment may target specific regions or a percentage of Firefox 139, though the details are not confirmed at the moment.
Mozilla may be looking for options beyond Google, and Perplexity is becoming a strong AI-powered search tool. If Firefox starts testing it, it could be an important change in how people search online.
Mozilla Firefox comes with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Wikipedia search engines. We need to wait and see if Firefox will officially add Perplexity to that list.
Apart from the potential collaboration between Firefox and Perplexity, Firefox will prompt users to agree to the terms of use via a pop-up on startup.