It's a great option to consider, but: * What matters is not just default placement, but actual share. How many would not switch to Google? Say hypothetically half which I think is generous. * That leaves them with the kind of share that Bing had prior to the yahoo deal. And bing was losing over a billion a year. * That still doesn't actually create a business model, because now they have create a search ad network to compete with AdWords. That's another tough problem - especially without scale.

So all in all I don't doubt they could raise some money, but chances of success would be extremely slim.

I don't think that Mozilla has a BATNA to Bing/Google which is why the economics are so different in each round. It's entirely based on Google and Bing bidding against each other.