Note that is the first ever straightforward announcement of the removal accessible to the end user, and it wasn't even available when release happened (about 12 hours ago). It's like giving a hard hat to a man that has already got to the emergency room.
That seems a bit overdramatic; it's not like people couldn't still access those search engines at all in Firefox; they just would have to go directly to the website instead of using the dropdown menu. I'd imagine that typing the name of one of them into Google or DuckDuckGo would lead to their site pretty easily
In theory, they get it for that reason. In practice, the actual reasons is that if Mozilla went under, Google would potentially have an anti-monopoly case on their hands. Or at least they think it's cheaper to pay Mozilla than to maybe find out if it's the case.
I believe Google knows better than anyone that market dominance is achieved not by “code quality”, or “features”, or “ease of use”, etc., but by attacking the clueless user with ads and press releases, and bundling the browser with crap like Ultimate Super Image Converter 2011, and paying generously for other sources of traffic. (Sorry, Google engineers doing incredible high-tech stuff, you're at most playing the role of exotic animals in the zoo attracting people who then proceed to sad low-tech data swindling.)
It might be less noticeable in the West, where Google hasn't really been challenged, but it was different in Russia. When Yandex had to switch to “defend the user share” mode, it stopped announcing interesting things (it used to please the public with nice stuff here and cool stuff there, and implemented some of that long before Google), and double downed on all that dumb crap (having the browser you fully control, having three ads to install it on a single page, pushing it into everything, and so on).
Yes, when Google Chrome started doing more frequent releases with new major version numbers, there was an impression that Chrome was newer and better while Firefox was still old and lagging with a low (single digit) version number. Then Firefox shifted to doing a release once every six weeks, and over the years, the major version number has closed in on Chrome and will overtake it soon.
On a related note, Firefox does have LTS (long term support) releases for enterprises or users who don’t want to move so fast. As I recall, Chrome was late to the LTS party, and before that it was forcing upgrades (because they happen periodically, behind the scenes) on users.
Firefox’s release cycles switched from six weeks to four weeks a few years ago. Chrome and Firefox are both on four week release cycles, so Firefox’ version number won’t overtake unless Mozilla or Google change something.
They’ll both hit version 100 in just a month or two. If too many websites are broken because they never expected a browser’s User-Agent string to have a version number with more than two digits, Chrome or Firefox might need to freeze the version number advertised in the User-Agent string.
I remember Mozilla were pretty pissed off at Chrome’s inaccurate versioning that induced a feeling of “chrome is 60 but ff is still on 3.5 so chrome has to be better “.
IME non-techy people don't even know the name of their browser (or that it's called a browser, "oh you mean The Internet") nevermind the version number.
I was wondering the same thing. I think over the past months or even years, Mozilla has been trying to get their version to be the same number as Chrome. Maybe if they focused on making a faster browser they wouldn’t need to play silly number games with their versions.
> Yandex and Mail.ru have been removed as optional search providers in the drop-down search menu in Firefox.
[0]https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/98.0.1/releasenotes/