“ The ultimate outcomes of an antitrust lawsuit should not cause collateral damage to the very organizations – like Mozilla – best positioned to drive competition and protect the interests of consumers on the web.”

Or in other words ... “We need Google’s money” ... Firefox

It's more like

"We need money. Due to Google monopolistic position, it's Google's money for now."

I think you would see a (further) mass exodus from people using Firefox if they suddenly changed the default search engine for all versions, in all languages worldwide, to Bing.

Is there even enough mass market adoption for such an exodus at this point?

Firefox has basically ceded its mass market usage to chrome.

From my subjective experience, the only people I see using it today are technical.

People keep claiming this, but how has Mozilla 'ceded' anything?

Firefox became somewhat popular at a time when the big player was Internet Explorer, and it was manifestly terrible.

As soon as Google started heavily promoting Chrome (which is, whatever else you might say about it, vastly superior to IE6) people switched to that.

What could Mozilla realistically do to compete against the world's largest marketing company pushing their browser?

By consistently and continually molding Firefox to be as similar to Chrome as possible instead of offering something different enough to present a meaningful choice.

Of course most users took the path of least resistance if the choice was between Chrome and pretty-much-also-Chrome.

I think FFs loss of market share of course has been affected by advertising, but mainly by their own mistakes. I don't think the similarities to Chrome (which were not really so great for a long time) were the main driver.

I tried to hold onto FF for as long as possible for ideological reasons, and then for some years when I couldn't justify it because of just terrible performance, I used Chromium. They had a much, much better plugin market / platform for a long time and that too was a larger part of the draw that differentiated them. I switched back to FF as soon as I heard they had dealt with most of their speed issues in an update but, extremely reluctantly, I have been considering whether they are any better than Chromium at this point with the privacy / ad shenanigans that really seem to insist on reappearing in different ways with great consistency lately. The recent monetization debacle has frankly been disheartening.

So the main points for me are that they failed on speed (which drove most people I know who switched to Chrome) and now on culture/honesty.

https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://github.com/intika/Librefox