The point is that the typical Chrome user is ending up sending all their URLs to Google, probably without even realizing it.
What fraction of them do you think would be OK with this if it were pointed out to them? My anecdotal sample suggests about 50% or so.
Violating the privacy of 50% of their users in a way they do not desire by default is not something Mozilla is likely to do. Google of course considers this perfectly ok, as expected. They don't believe in this antiquated "privacy" thing to start with.
As far as "turn it off", you can also switch to using a single combined search bar in Firefox if you want to mess with the settings. This discussion is about defaults.
But the point remains: they send what you type in the url bar to your default search engine. This is not behavior many users are OK with once they realize it's happening.
What fraction of them do you think would be OK with this if it were pointed out to them? My anecdotal sample suggests about 50% or so.
Violating the privacy of 50% of their users in a way they do not desire by default is not something Mozilla is likely to do. Google of course considers this perfectly ok, as expected. They don't believe in this antiquated "privacy" thing to start with.
As far as "turn it off", you can also switch to using a single combined search bar in Firefox if you want to mess with the settings. This discussion is about defaults.