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Mozilla makes money from having users — it may be open-source but the developers still need to be paid. They don't have a captive audience like Windows or Google.com users to advertise on, so public ads seem necessary.

"Mozilla makes money from having users"

Wait, how does that work again? Last I checked you couldn't deposit users at the bank or pay your rent with them.

ELI5 example: The more users you have, the more the search providers (like Google, Yahoo and Yandex) may pay you to be the default search provider in a certain region.

When a user searches Google from the Firefox toolbar (or Yahoo, or Bing) the relevant search engine pays them a little bit of money.

Not really "per search"... the deals are negotiated for N years. If that was per search Mozilla's finances would not be in such good shape, which could actually help them focus on chasing the right targets.

There's a non-profit Mozilla Foundation and a for-profit Mozilla Corporation. Presumably MoCo bought the ad.

Why does it trouble you?

Wasn't really aware about MoCo and their deals with all major search engines.