Honestly typing "privacy" into a UI that is designed to act as a search field for Google, and blaming that on Mozilla somehow, that's a stretch. What's next? Typing "which company faked the moon landing" and WOW you're redirect to Google! It must have been them.

It's nothing but opinionated. You can't honestly call this a "fact" and go on to claim that HN is hypocritical. That's... is there a word for hypocrisy about hypocrisy?

(The first point made is not even that bad, it's just that quagmire following it which dilutes the whole thing)

If Mozilla wanted to respect privacy the "UI that is designed to act as a search field for Google" could be a "UI that is designed to act as a search field for DuckDuckGo", it wasn't that long ago it was a search field for Yahoo. What's notable here is that Google is the default and in doing so is endorsed and recommended by Mozilla for its users.

So the fact here is that Mozilla made that choice to be in bed with Google.

The sad irony is Chrome on Android will insist on asking users for the default search engine choice (in the EU at least https://www.techspot.com/news/81273-google-android-users-eur... ).

Maybe think about it another way. Imagine Greenpeace defaulted to offering to book supporters private planes to get to every protest. It is this nature of extreme distance from organisational values that Mozilla is expressing when it defaults to Google search.

Let's completely neglect in those "facts" that Google offers the best search engine and that people want to use it

Brave defaults to Google in most countries, but we get paid $0 for it. We also disable auto-suggestions based on key by key tracking to Google as you type your search term, leaving it as an option some users choose to enable.

This isn't that hard (except for doing without the big bucks, which is hard: Brave is building up small revenue to large, not profitable yet -- again, we pay the user >= what we make, 70% of gross revenue for user-private ads, 15% for publisher partnered ads [not yet launched]).

I'm saddened that Google is the default. I hope Brave asks users in the future, but understand there are probably a few different goals being juggled whilst Brave grows.

I think that ship has pretty much sailed, but in either case that has nothing to do with Firefox's decision. If they wanted to use Google, for whatever reason, they could do so while supporting user privacy by piping it through e.g. Startpage.

They just want the Google $$$, privacy be damned.

I won't violate any NDA still binding me to Mozilla by agreeing that the default search deal in Mozilla is and historically has been done for funding the company. If they wanted to switch, they could -- but it would hurt financially, big time. That could imperil the project as a whole. It would definitely limit salaries at the top.