Yandex, Russia's most-popular search company, will be replaced by Google when Firefox 14 ships July 17. A beta of Firefox 14, however, launched on Thursday with Google as the first-ranked search engine.

The switch was triggered by the multi-year agreement that Mozilla and Google struck last year, Mozilla's chief counsel said Saturday.

"We recently selected Google as the default search partner for Firefox," noted Harvey Anderson in a message , Mozilla's bug- and change-tracking database. "These arrangements are often global in nature; consequently, we were not able to keep Yandex as the default search provider in the Firefox Russian builds."

The Bugzilla entry was started June 5 to track the change to Firefox 14 required by the search swap.

A Yandex spokesman echoed Anderson.