Firefox 40 has just launched, and Mozilla proudly announced that it's Windows 10 compatible. Firefox 39 ran just fine on Windows 10, of course, so what's new? For one thing, Firefox's ability to hijack Cortana searches.
If Firefox 40 is set as your default web browser on Windows 10, it will automatically re-route queriesthat Cortana sends its way from Bing to whatever your default search provider happens to be. After the update to v40, clicking the “search the web” button fired my request to see the Indians-Yankees score off to DuckDuckGo.
Interestingly, Mozilla chose to make this functionality an opt-out, and it's easy enough to see why. If you've set a default browser and a default search engine and that's the combo you use to look things up on the Web, there's a very good chance that you want to use it even when you start your search from the Windows desktop.
Still, making the setting an opt-out is a bit of a curious move from Mozilla. They're altering the way Windows 10 behaves by default without giving the user that choice up front. It's possible that some users want to let searches initiated by Cortana get sent to Bing, yet Firefox 40 assumes that they'd rather use their browser default. Their CEO also just got finished blasting Microsoft for ignoring user choice… and opt-ins are always a better way to respect choice than opt-outs.
Mozilla has also introduced numerous features like this on the first tab that Firefox loads following an update. Why not tell users about it there and let them opt in instead?
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