Note that Mozilla trusted us enough to invest in Cliqz, and we passed their security and privacy audit before they started their experiment with our search in the dropdown. At this time we did also built prototypes together for webextension APIs that would be able to tweak the url bar's behaviour.

Unfortunately, as we mentioned in a previous post [1], Mozilla is not totally independent when it comes to the presentation of search in Firefox due to their existing search deals, so they couldn't continue with the integration. This is why we needed our fork.

Disclaimer: I work for Cliqz

[1]: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-11/the-pivot-that-excited-mozi...