Seems like a natural progression. Yandex gets a significant chunk of Russian search traffic and also offer email and cloud storage. Presumably the default search engine will be Yandex...
Whoa, It automatically imports everything from Chrome. Which includes cookies (and as extension login sessions), bookmarks, extensions etc.<p>Is it just me or - I find that somewhat scary.I daresay, I would expect Chrome to encrypt sensitive information it saves on disk. Yandex does not seem to have imported the plaintext passwords thankfully, but I don't think I trust a new service with this much of private information.<p>In other words - Chrome, please stop random applications from copying my login sessions and cookies.
Just like I switched off Opera when it became a webkit fork, I do not see any reason in installing another one.<p>From my experience, Yandex is only good for one thing: Russian maps. Their accuracy and features are still unparalleled on Russian territory.<p>When it comes to browser though, I would still use Chrome if I wanted WebKit, FireFox if I wanted features and Opera 12 if I wanted great user experience.
Download page is in Russian, but the interface is in English when installed. International site (<a href="http://browser.yandex.com" rel="nofollow">http://browser.yandex.com</a>) still has "We're working on it".
So much anti-Russian sentiment - why is Hacker News so full of politics!? Are NSA or GCHQ any better? The thing is that other countries don't trust stuff built in the US anymore and you will see more and more of these.
Some useful extensions like LastPass, Adguard, Pocket and Evernote are packaged (but not enabled) by default. Functionally it's Yandexified Chromium (vs Googlized Chromium aka Chrome—and modulo UI chrome of course).