Does it still have a relationship with Google?
For a while, the Thunderbird default search engine was pegged to Bing. There was no easy way to change it. A marketer came to the bugzilla to explain they would not fix it for business reasons.
Re:Mozilla Research Projects
by tinalumfoil on Wednesday December 24, 2014 @05:19PM
(#8794726)
Which seems backwards because before Chrome, Google would pay Mozilla pretty large amounts of money [0] just to have their search as an easily-changeable default.
I'm not sure if it still has relationships with Google, but it did form a partnership with Yahoo recently [https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/11/yahoo-and-mozilla-for...].
They diversified. I Think they provide Yahoo search by default most places, Yandex in Russia, and some other one in China.
Yahoo! is the default for U.S.A. Yandex for Russia, Baidu for China. All the others default to Google. And yes, you can always change the default search engine to your preferred one in the preferences.
That it is the only independent vendor doing so is categorically false.
That it always puts people over profits is questionable. It's relationship with Google and reliance on ad revenue runs counter to those principles. Perhaps it is doing so as a survival tactic only, but they do compromise on the principle.