Unless someone wants to pay Firefox an ungodly sum out of their own pocket I fail to see how relying on Google for search engine money is so bad.
They clearly are going different ways with the browser and aren’t beholden to them.
I don’t have a problem with that either, if:
- It doesn’t affect Firefox’s direction (which it doesn’t look to me like it does)
- The user can remove it and provide alternatives.
The second one is in issue. Removing it is easy enough but Mozilla keeps making adding and using alternatives harder. They removed OpenSearch support so there’s no way to automatically add a new search engine; you have to manually find the query url and convert it into a template string. That’s a ridiculous thing to ask a user to do and exactly what OpenSearch was meant to solve. They also made it harder to use your alternative search engines, especially on mobile where you have to tap through sections of the new tab page
