There are ways to go about this that are much cleaner and less suspect.
By simply shoehorning this into the existing Snippets functionality and deploying it without warning they're continuing a dark interaction pattern with their users.
Their response to the issue - a weird way of maybe saying they weren't paid for this and that it is purely to help users - is either a weasel words lie or a ridiculously out of touch action that is not cognizant of how much goodwill they've been tarnishing over the past year.
What are those ways? Develop a separate search engine product where their primary revenue would be from ads there so they can release a web browser to track you more to increasse the reveneu from such ads that do not appear in your browser, but are aided by your browser?
I didn't say they should avoid ads, I said (in effect) that they should avoid dark patterns.
Simply announce the intention before and with the update, be clear about it and how to truly/fully enable and disable it. Doesn't even have to be a popup.
This and many of their recent interactions have avoided that transparency and been very disengenuous with their communications before and after the fact.
When you start to think that you have to be sneaky to get ads in front of users, or to monetize at all then you are already thinking of it as 'us vs. the users' and that's quite a bad position to be in. Especially for a company who has been banking on the user goodwill market lately.
How they're going about this paints a very conflicting picture of Mozilla. The organization seems bipolar at best.
If you look at their financial statement they received 6 million in donations. They paid 250 million dollars for software development. So donations cover just 2.4% of their software development expenses. That doesn't include sga expenses or any of their other expenses.
If you really want you can just build the browser your self and change the startup page.
By simply shoehorning this into the existing Snippets functionality and deploying it without warning they're continuing a dark interaction pattern with their users.
Their response to the issue - a weird way of maybe saying they weren't paid for this and that it is purely to help users - is either a weasel words lie or a ridiculously out of touch action that is not cognizant of how much goodwill they've been tarnishing over the past year.
Neither bodes well for them.