... after spending years saying that the relationship with Google regarding search royalties was a serendipitous one that involved getting paid for a decision that was the right thing for users whether money was changing hands or not, and that the default search engine spot wasn't actually for sell.
That lie is not unlike their carefully crafted PR statements that were intended to mislead people about the financial arrangement regarding the Pocket partnership. Those efforts turned out to be so successful that they hoodwinked many of Mozilla Corporation's own employees—who interpreted the statements to mean that there was no financial incentive, just as it was intended to be interpreted by the general public. Then those employees began showing up on places like HN and started saying explicitly that there was no money changing hands, even though that's not what the PR statements ever said and reality actually differed.