You are not engaging with anything I said. I asked for evidence of Google's control over Firefox beyond "they have a search engine deal", and you seem unwilling or unable to provide it. Therefore I can only assume it does not exist and are simply making spurious claims for which no evidence exists.
The lack of default privacy and ad blocking in Firefox is the evidence.
The fact that Google continues to pay even as Firefox marketshare shrinks to irrelevance is evidence.
The more pertinent question for potential users is evidence that it does not influence tbem. By any reasonable measure, default Firefox is not "the privacy browser".
In this case why does the browser have a pop-up blocker? Or why does it warn about potentially malicious websites (via SafeBrowsing)?
If it's not their job to curate what you see then it should show you the raw unfiltered badness of the web and let you deal with it yourself.
Hey your email provider also shouldn't do curation either, then why does it have a spam filter?!?! Checkmate atheists!
Ad blockers just use a list of known malicious URLs/domains/CSS selectors and use that to block/hide elements.
This is identical to Safe Browsing (preventing loading of known malicious domains) which you seem to be fine with and don't see as "curation".
These are just more vague accusations, and just as unencumbered by any evidence as your previous vague accusations were.