Yahoo! Inc.’s deal with Mozilla Corp. to become the default search engine in the Firefox browser is paying dividends with stats released showing that Yahoo usage has tripled in Firefox 34 vs. Firefox 33.

Web metrics company StatCounter reported that Yahoo usage on Firefox 34 in the U.S. on December 2 was 29.4 percent compared to 9.6 percent for Firefox 33. Google search usage by Firefox users dropped from 82.1 percent to 63.5 percent as they upgraded to the new version.

“Firefox 34 is still being rolled out, so its usage is currently quite low. It will be interesting to see how this develops,” CEO of StatCounter Aodhan Cullen said. “At the moment, the change is having a negligible impact on overall search share in the U.S., but if this early usage trend on Firefox 34 continues, then Yahoo could be on course to gain a number of percentage points.”

Overall search share across all browsers in the U.S. on December 2, according to StatCounter, was 78 percent for Google, 12.4 percent for Bing and 7.9 percent for Yahoo.

While there is currently little movement in the overall search market share, it’s a good start for the Yahoo/Mozilla deal, indicating there is still value in default browser search deals.

A report in November suggested that Apple may follow in Mozilla’s footsteps and dump the Mountain View-based search giant and is already being courted by both Bing and Yahoo as the current default search engine deal comes up for review in 2015.

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