And nobody has ever demonstrated that this ostensible "dependence" has any adverse effects on Mozilla's policy.
And you're right, the non-profit-status doesn't imply that, they could just as well do the same as a commercial enterprise. It would be more obvious that way.
Would Mozilla make the step to ship an adblocker with Firefox? It would certainly be what their users want (the most popular extension by far being uBlock Origin), but it would pretty much decrease their worth to Google to zero, hence kill the funding. And there's your conflict of interest.
And perhaps you and I know how to disable an ad blocker selectively. An average user might simply see problems with websites and uninstall Firefox as "not working", tanking its marketshare even more.
So Google doesn't necessarily factor into that decision, really.
Mozilla Foundation has google as it’s biggest revenue source [0], so if Google ever decides to change this it will cripple the org.
I think this would be different if revenue came from many donors so this risk would be lower.
I use FireFox and support Mozilla, but it’s challenging to donate to FireFox as Mozilla runs quite a few projects.
Nobody is perfect, but non-profits have risks like any organization.
[0] was yahoo for a while, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
Not really. They do have a rainy-day fund, and they have experimented with partnering with other search providers in the past (such as Microsoft, or country-local search engines like Yandex). The main reason they still use Google is that the users prefer it. But if Google decides not to pay anymore, Mozilla will survive.
