Of all the competitions going on right now between tech firms (over who has the best social network, who has the best mobile phone OS, etc), the browser wars might have just become the most surreal.

On Wednesday, Microsoft, the company that faced numerous antitrust allegations over bundling its Internet Explorer browser for free with its Windows operating system in the 1990s, announced it was teaming up with Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, which rose out of the ashes of the Netscape browser, which Internet Explorer helped kill off.

That¡¯s right, users can now download an all-new ¡°Firefox with Bing,¡± actually just Firefox version 7.01 with Bing as the built-in search bar in the corner, the default homepage and as the search technology behind the ¡°AwesomeBar,¡± aka the URL bar at the top of the browser, into which users can enter letters and keywords and allow Bing to suggest websites based on previous browser history.

¡°We are excited to make it even easier for members of the Mozilla Firefox community to use Bing. Please let us know what you think,¡± wrote Tor Steiner, manager of strategic partnerships at Microsoft, in a post on the Bing blog.

Of course, as Steiner noted in his post, the move is simply the natural culmination of an increasing collaboration between the two companies on built-in browser Bing search functionality that began a year ago. Back in October 2010, the companies announced that Bing would appear as one of the options in the upper-right hand corner search bar in the Firefox browser.

And actually, the collaboration can be dated even further back, to August 2005, when a Microsoft executive extended an olive branch to the Mozilla team in the form of an invitation for the two companies to collaborate on ensuring maximum Firefox interoperability with then-forthcoming Windows Vista. Unofficially, Mozilla¡¯s lead developer has also expressed his uneasiness with Google¡¯s values, specifically with regards to user privacy, and advocated that Firefox Web users switch to searching on Bing instead of Google.

But the burgeoning friendship has also come as Mozilla¡¯s relationship with Google has frayed, and may now be on the verge of being terminated.

By: DocMemory
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