They need to make a deal with someone that monetizes search at a very high level. DuckDuckGo uses Yahoo! to monetize its search engine.

Which in turns get from Bing. So really, there isn't a better choice for Mozilla. I honestly don't have a preference on Google vs others. As long as there is a way to disable tracking as a preference, done deal. I am not too scared of Google's tracking, but I understand others are.

I could see that, but at the same time Mozilla and Google already work together quite often when it comes to implementing and standardizing new browser features. It's been my understanding that their relationship is more chummy than it is competitive. Though maybe this is different at the engineer level than "corporate".

Same goes for the IE team: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/10/27/mozilla-sends-the-i...

It's important not to conflate "Google that develops a web browser" with "Google the advertising and search company". The same applies to the parts of Mozilla that would interact with these parts of Google.

For both Google and Mozilla, the goals of these two (or more!) groups of decision makers will not necessarily align at all times. Ideally, whatever may be going on at the ad/search/business level shouldn't impact collaboration on web standards and implementation.

I think you're probably correct. Both Goog and Mozilla are large companies with many teams, and I may be putting undue emphasis on the specific interactions I've seen between their browser teams. Thanks for your input.