>For us, this change means a tremendous simplification in terms of maintenance and development. We used to build Firefox ourselves using Ubuntu’s packaging (which is set to be discontinued as Ubuntu is moving towards snap). We now package the Mozilla version of Firefox instead.
If they felt like it was a choice between using a Canonical Snap or going with Mozilla's packaged Firefox, I suppose I'd have made the same choice too.
Interesting. I wonder if any money is changing hands. It looks like Mint is actually giving up some if its potential revenue from search engine clicks in order to make its version of Firefox closer-to-upstream, and so I wouldn't be surprised if Mozilla is compensating them for that.
> I used Yahoo/DuckDuckGo/StartPage as my default search engine, will it continue to be my default?
> No, these were core engines in the Linux Mint configuration. They no longer are present in the Mozilla version of Firefox. The default engine will switch to Google. DuckDuckGo will remain available but with a different URL (it’s a Mint search partner in the Mint configuration, but only a Mozilla partner in the Mozilla configuration).
> Which search engines generate an income for Linux Mint?
> In Firefox the only engine which generates an income for Linux Mint is Google.
> In other browsers the only engines which generate an income for Linux Mint are Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Startpage.
Sure, but the carrot has to be compelling from the distro end to do that.
For example, my distro (Fedora) has its own RPM packaged for Firefox that often runs a few days/weeks behind Firefox upstream. I believe this is because Fedora Firefox has its own QA that sometimes catches distro-specific bugs. I'm not positive. The "carrot" in switching to, say, the official Firefox flatpak that comes straight from Mozilla is that I might get the latest-greatest version faster from release, rather than waiting for Fedora QA.
But for Mint, it seems like they previously derived some revenue from having default search providers that differed from Mozilla's default. So the carrot that Mozilla is offering Mint would probably need to be better than "We think your users will like using a version closer to upstream." They'd presumably need some agreement in place to compensate for the revenue lost from having Yahoo or DDG be the default search provider.
Based on a comment from Clem in the page's comment section, it looks like they might either be getting some revenue either from Mozilla or from Google directly in switching the default search back to Google.
If they felt like it was a choice between using a Canonical Snap or going with Mozilla's packaged Firefox, I suppose I'd have made the same choice too.