I just saw a post complaining about the Mozilla layoffs.
I wanted to point out that the vast majority of their income (over 85% in 2022) is from having Google as the default search engine - Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.
Expect things to get worse.
Please don’t assume it was just a cruel choice.
So it’s the default. Big deal. You can change that when you start the app first time. If that gets them funding that’s not a horrible price to pay. Also, that’s not money getting influence exactly, that’s a transaction. “We will pay $x to get this status.” Not the same at all as “I donated lots of money therefore I get to say how you develop the software.”
I haven’t seen the contract between google and firefox.
Maybe “how you develop the software” is a bit far-fetched, I was more thinking about decide where to put efforts into e.g.: continue developing Firefox’s core mechanic of being a privacy oriented webbrowser instead of… whatever they are doing with the funding they get.