To be fair, Mozilla has come out with a lot of new services that have dramatically decreased their dependency on Google. They went from over 95% of their revenue being google royalties to less than 70% just in the past half decade
That's progress, but also: why is this the structure? It makes no sense to not send donations to the thing they think they're donating to, and I really can't believe that there's no way they could have structured it to make that work.
Still though. 70% is a lot to be dependent on Google for. And the way Google operates these days, I'm honestly surprised that their interest in Firefox remains.
Google wants Firefox to remain viable (or at least one other browser) so that they can avoid monopoly issues with Chrome. If they pay Firefox to keep Google as default search engine, they keep 80% of the money they’d get by having those users use Chrome, and they keep the other browser alive, but not enough to really keep up with Chrome’s feature set.
That’s the most likely bet they are making, similar to Apple/Android or Safari/Chrome. Spending a minor fraction of your revenue to avoid anti-trust probably makes sense for them.
