I have always used Mullvad Leta as my search engine, but after changing smartphone and download Fennec, I ended up leaving DuckDuckgo that comes standard for now. However, after the last Fennec update (140.0.0), I was surprised to have Google as a standard search engine. What do you think of this? Someone with this same experience?
I wasn’t paying that much attention, I hope I am not badmouthing mozilla, but I believe I had the same experience with snap install of Firefox on current xbuntu. Maybee a month ago? I am using DDG by default and always remove Google from the search engine list. The thing updates, I do a random search and get the google screen asking me all the questions about cookies and privacy I simply don’t know how to answer. I go into settings and find google set as default search engine. What is even stranger, I can no longer remove google from the list! This seems to me so ridiculous I decide it has to be a bug I am happy to report that when I’ve noticed next update (becase those annoying tabs informing about new features) - I was again able to remove google from the search engine list.
Mozilla acts pretty scary nowadays - maybe naively - I am pinning my hopes on Ladybird.
I mean they get a bajilliontrillion dollars from google every year to set it as the default search engine, so idk why people here are surprised at all. But yes, firefox needs a hard fork by some organization with more neutral funding.
Firefox on Ubuntu’s repository is now managed fully by Mozilla, while in the past it wasn’t. Mozilla has had a deal with Google for years to be the default search engine that has massively helped them stay alive as a company.
You are simply now getting an official build instead of a modified one, and official builds don’t let you remove Google from the main interface due to this contract.