Things like this illustrate why it's a bit disingenuous to praise the nonprofit status of Mozilla as some huge distinguishing factor. Not only do the executives pay themselves more than generous salaries (1m for chair, 874k for director, 908k for treasurer) but nonprofit doesn't mean free from commercial concerns. They still need to make money to pay those salaries and support their projects. It seems wiser to judge the ethos of a company based on their actions and decisions instead of their corporate tax status.
[1] - https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2014_Mozilla_Found...
They just switched from Yahoo as the default. So it's not like there's only one company paying the bills (and pulling the strings).
> It seems wiser to judge the ethos of a company based on their actions and decisions instead of their corporate tax status.
I do. I judge them based off the tools they build and the fine line they walk between making boatloads of money and actually providing services for people who care about privacy. Sometimes they get this wrong, but they try really hard.
And, really, the alternative is Google. That's not to say Mozilla shouldn't strive to be the best that they can, but if they were to disappear, we'd be using a closed-source browser built by the biggest ad company in the world who has demonstrated over and over that your privacy is antithetical to their business.
If Mozilla fold, you could still use chromium. Effectively no privacy difference between chromium and firefox tbh. (Unless you use tracking protection in private browsing, but extensions let you do the same in chromium.)