moonshineshadow: Huh yahoo, ads? Did I miss something? Of course I might not be seeing that because of addons I use.
Some major search engines give a portion of ad revenue from search results pages to browser companies (based on the user agent string, I think) to persuade them to release the browsers with support for those search engines built in. In the past, Google has paid the most, so they got to be the default search engine. Now Yahoo came in with a better offer so they get to be default instead, but you can still switch to Google easily.
The ads are in the "new tab" page. You know when you open a new tab Firefox shows you a bunch of tiles with thumbnails of websites you visit frequently? (well, I have new tabs set to about:blank, but that's just me). Well, new users have no browsing history, so now the tiles initially point to sponsored sites. I'm OK with this.