Who the bleep do you think pays for Mozilla's electic bill
I'd fault you for not googling it, but burying the public record of the whole sordid mess was completed years ago, and unless you know some way to go back in time, you never see the public and bitter fight of this. Old time devs slugged it out on MDN over cookies and tracking systems. The" people are lazy" and "we want add money camps" won the day, and the foundation slowly dismantled forums where they faced public scrutiny and deleted the comment history (all of it, not just the critical posts, wouldn't want to be that obvious.)
Sadly, there would be no Firefox without Netscape and Mozilla selling us out. Enough money wasn't coming in. But Google didn't become their number one sponsor out of boundless generosity. The company is a fig leaf Google, Apple, and Microsoft have worn at different times to cover their shame in the eyes of the regulators. (nothing to see here, certainly no illegal monopolies)
They spun their Google sugar daddy relationship off as a way to fight Microsoft, and provided cover for Adwords to eat all it's competition until Apple took over the mobile market. They drug their heels blocking Facebook and Twitter from tracking people that weren't even signed into their site, or even had accounts.
And the number one excuse for years has been that it's the individual site operators fault, even though they provide the platform that is being abused.
Firefox will never be relevant again. It's stuck in the single digits, it's senior problem staff can't remember a time when their product was actually good. Not satisfied to stop there they keep making it a worse and more annoying clone of their competition instead of putting the things it used to do well front and center. And their attempts to pivot away from laundered ad money from Google and Bing search have been a lesson in hard sell harassment. I'm about as likely to sign up for pocket as to install the Reddit app on my phone.