Oh! you meant "paid engines", not that they are "better paid", sorry for the misunderstanding. And you say this is "the word on the streets" (small street, since kagi does not even show in the stats, and you need to pay to really test it out properly, right?). Ok, that puts things into perspective.
The fact that some people seem to be content with chatgpt as a search engine is testament of how big the gap in consumer requirements/demands for a search engine can be (and a reason why google is integrating AI already in their search).
There's many people who open the search just to go to websites they already know (they don't even use bookmarks!) or sometimes one just wanna know the most popular place for a particular topic.. or questions, issues or problems that have already been faced by many other humans before. LLMs and smaller search engines work perfectly for that since they will quickly give you the most mainstream and/or broadly agreed upon answers.. but if you want to find a specific version of a specific copy of a niche work in a specific language different than the original.. an image in as big of a resolution as possible that only appears in a specific page of a rare book.. then chances are that things start becoming harder and harder to find.
I've been using alternative search engines as my default in all my computers for many years too (I don't remember when, I think pre-covid). I even made a simple userscript for Qwant. And that's why I'm telling you that Google is still better. Granted, maybe I don't need to open Google every week, maybe not even every month, but what I'm telling you is that the times I give up and do, I often get a better outcome.
chrome is incredibly important to google for the simple reason it allows them to basically dominate the advertising market.
You forget that google ads boom happened in a world where IE6 and Firefox were the primary browsers. Google already had years of domination in the web advertising market before chrome, and their star product that helped them was Search. They don't really need chrome to allow them to do that, chrome is just a single piece in the bigger chessboard. Sure, I'm not saying it's not an important piece, but it's one that, if they must, they can afford to lose.
Also, I'd like to note that things like adblockers aren't a threat to Google's domination of the advertising market.. they are a threat to the web's advertising market in general. So it's not like Google will be less of a monopoly, but that the market for ads in websites would shrink. Those are 2 different things, Google can still hold monopoly over the market even if the market is smaller.
can track everything a user does.
If you say this, then you can't put all Chromium browsers in the same "Google" bucket. MS Edge, for example, only sends data to MS, not to Google.. and most alternative Chromium browsers reject the tracking, and are also instrumental in the "push back" I mentioned earlier (I even linked to the post of one specific chromium variant that has been a big critic of google's "privacy sandbox"). I'd argue Mozilla might not even be the most influential, considering Apple's Safari does have more users than Firefox (15% vs only 3.7% from Firefox) and an entire OS ecosystem that they are quite good at locking people on. They have been refusing to implement those changes too.
Firefox sends data to Mozilla, but thanks to the resolution of this judge, they are encouraged to entice their users to keep sending every single thing they type in the search bar (even if you don't press enter) to Google as well. It's not like users escape Google's influence just by switching browsers, that's not how it works. If Google strikes a deal with Mozilla to extend their tracking / data sharing even further (if they aren't doing it already, which is entirely possible), would you also greenlight that too for the sake of Mozilla's finances?
gnome/kde do not have the resources to maintain a browser
qutebrowser/Gnome/KDE/(et al) browsers use Webkit, they don't handle all the maintenance by themselves, there are many projects that help and also companies, the bigger one being Apple. And like I said, Webkit and Blink (Chrome's engine) are more and more distantly different from each other.
once i managed to get most of google nonsense isolated its search performance crated to be similar to microsofts and duckduckgo
This implies monoculture in search is HARDER to remove because it actually gives better result. You need to force your search to become worse by not using it just so that it can lower to the same lower quality as the rest.
The conclusion I get from this is that intervention in search is MORE important, because without any change you get a snowball effect that will create an unfair advantage over all the other competitors. And they can track data from everywhere, not just search, not just browser, not just maps, not just youtube... etc.
Either you split Google in many pieces (something the judges don't wanna do... again, bad decision), or you at least cut the head of the dragon who is benefiting the most from this profiling and data collection: advertising and search.
judge made the right call here, full stop, end of discussion.
In reality this isn't even targeted to protect Firefox. If they really wanted that they could have easily made it an exception JUST for Mozilla (or for open source browsers in general.. or for non-chromium browsers.. or pick whatever you see fair).
Instead they want a more free market. In fact, this might still hurt Mozilla, since the ruling is saying that a different deal needs to be struck that's non-exclusive and in different terms. It's perfectly possible that this still results in less money being offered to Mozilla, depending on the details.. or that it might be more beneficial to, say, Opera, since it's likely they were being paid less than Mozilla.
Also, on top of "non-exclusive" it also says "revenue-sharing", implying that the payment would be done based on how many people choose Google, and I expect the percentage of Firefox users that keep Google might be lower than other browsers. The previous exclusive deal (that, as I understand it, got Google to pay Mozilla a fixed fee to be the default) might have actually been better to keep if the judges wanted to ensure Mozilla Corporation's pockets are safe.
Google has the final say on what goes into Chromium. However, they don't have the final say on what each individual Chromium-based browser decides to do. Google definitely influences the decision, but they can't dictate it. This is made apparent in the responses of Chromium-based browsers to the changes that are perceived as counter-productive.
The one with that final say is the one in the final end of the chain producing the browser. The one who ultimately decides whether to update/rebase to the new version of chromium or not; or abandon chromium entirely and maybe use something else, like Webkit, that many other Linux browsers are using; or coordinate together to maintain a version with certain features removed; or maybe just simply abandon the project and contribute this way to the death of the Chromium ecosystem. Google has no say in who decides to raise their voice and publicly expose Google practices in blog posts that have been linked already in this thread.
Plus, the second most used browser is not Firefox.. it's Safari, another non-Chromium based browser independent of Chrome's current codebase, and that has also opposed to those changes. It's engine is used in products from many other companies independent from Google that are no small fries (Amazon, Sony Playstation, Nintendo, Valve, Samsung's Tizen, etc.) and it no longer shares code specific to Chrome, Google's influence over WebKit ended when they moved over to Blink.