How does promoting Yandex and Baidu in regions where they are already dominant (Russia and China, respectively) align with Mozilla's new mission? I'm not sure how entrenching their hold on their home markets promotes user choice, innovation, or privacy.
Nowhere does it say that Mozillas new mission is to break up market dominant players.
Their new search strategy is to globally have more search partners than before, while continueing to serve regions with default search that are good/best for that region.
There is no doubt that Baidu gives better result than Google for most Chinese users. I dont know much about Yandex, but Im sure they have a better grasp of the Russian users than Google does right now and thus provides better service.
I don't think there's any danger of Google taking over the Chinese market...
Perhaps Yandex is more at risk, but my impression is that Yandex dominates Russia much as Google leads the US. In Russia, Google is the underdog. Firefox's switch can only dampen competition in the Russian market, while users in markets without Yandex neither gain nor lose.
The rest of the world may stand to benefit, if these national champions expand beyond their borders, and if they offer users a better choice than the competition. But that remains to be proven. In the meantime, Mozilla's switch will certainly have a measurable impact on the current competitive landscape.
What should they do in Russia? Help the second biggest player, which is Google? :)
Although TBH, in Russia there are mail.ru(with their search engine) and sputnik.ru (a search engine funded by company called Rostelekom. The majority of it is owned by state/government).
