[bigbugbag]

You're missing part of the picture here.

Yahoo has been the default engine in firefox... for the US market. it was still google everywhere else in the world except Russia where they went with yandex.

Mozilla got a lot of flak in Europe for not replacing google in the part of the world that mattered the most , where they have the most market share and where there is a good local alternative that actually respect privacy and was willing to do business with them (qwant).

And the reason for the yahoo deal is that yahoo was trying to sell and needed this firefox deal to better negotiate their own sale at a time when mozilla was actively trying to move away from google (well maybe not that actively).

To my knowledge there was not a time when google was not default search engine in firefox at all.

[dao-]

No, you're still missing most of the picture. Mozilla didn't get paid for Google being the default outside of the US, China and Russia when it made Yahoo the default in the US. Mozilla had a global deal with Google and that expired. Bottomline is, most of Mozilla's 2016 revenue came from Yahoo.

[Buge]

That seems weird. There was no search engine that was willing to pay money to be default outside of US, China, and Russia?

[Feniks]

In Europe Google has a 90+% market share. At this point nobody even bothers to compete.

[dao-]

There was no search engine willing to pay that would deliver good enough search results in those markets...

[gcb0]

even if they don't have a explicit deal, they got search revenue sharing from google on those markets.

not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently.

[magicalist]

> not to mention sending every single url you visit to google servers to check for malware or something. just like chrome. ...though I think that is now a local search recently.

Safe search/browsing has always been local.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing