Yet, in a redacted copy of an internal email chain released on Friday, Jim Kolotouros, the vice president of Android Platform Partnerships, wrote: “Chrome exists to serve Google search, and if it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero (for me).”
So Chrome’s whole point is bringing users to Google Search… and Google Search’s whole point is Google Ads. I’m Glad I use Firefox.
Dunno about “the last update” or the current state in each region but as far as I know the default search engine in FireFox has varied over the years and has always depended what country you’re in.
Baidu, Yandex and Yahoo are / have been the default in some countries. They made Bing the default for “1%” of users in a bunch of major countries recently to test the waters (and didn’t take it further than that).
Google blocks traffic from Chinese IP addresses as a protest against censorship there, so nobody has Google as the default in that country.
TBH, 26.3 billion dollars are just a drop in the bucket for Google. That bucket of course filled with the money they got with industrial scale spying, cross-site tracking, denial of control, forced ads, destruction of competition, among countless dirty tricks they play on regular netizens.
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