Or Mozilla could implement something similar but not shady.
Firefox is, has always been, and always will be, open source. The Mozilla server side is similarly also open source. But Mozilla is quite small compared to Google and Microsoft, and so must partner with external parties for things like Search and Pocket.
There is no expectation of an integrated closed source "cloud reader" and attempts to paint this like "aww gee shucks it would be great it we could do something about this but thats just the way they world is" come off as extremely disingenious, especially as the mobile version of firefox had this feature baked in with no reliance on any third party at all.
"Online advertisements with active content aren't shady, almost all networks use them!"
Except for course, what you said it's identical are a notoriously shady group of activities, which has led to much abuse my market leaders at various times (Google, Microsoft), and we see no difference here. For that matter, neither do you.
I get that Firefox benefits from shipping the integration, but you haven't provided any good technical reasons for it not being fundamentally a shift in the way you do business and kind of exploitative.
Holding up a bunch of famous exploitations as "me too!"ing is tonedeafly missing the complaint.
So yes, the market is fundamentally shady for "browser integrations".
I do think, however, that to compete with other browsers, such integration is necessary. If Firefox doesn't integrate with search, users will not find it useful, because they are so used to using google.com and so forth.
So I agree browsers would be better with no such integrations. It's a necessary, sometimes painful compromise.
This is a particularly weak case, because what's really needed for this feature at the browser level is an API for search providers, backed by several plugins which take advantage of the feature and offer various providers.
However, that's not what Firefox did here, as far as anyone can tell. Why not? No technical reason has been provided, and the replies have been so completely off topic as to cause a long debate thread over that very reasonable concern.
Firefox tightly coupled a technology to their platform rather than providing a service API and plugins, and we have no understanding of why a group committed to openness would make such a fundamentally close source move.
Historically speaking, the reasons groups do that is malice.
This is precisely why I don't use Chrome! I like Google search but I don't like how Chrome keeps me logged into their services.
What are you asking for, exactly? That the browser should force you to login twice?
It's nowhere near my only problem with Chrome, but it's one of the big ones.
I want to be logged in in Chrome so that my bookmarks sync between devices. But I want to be logged out of my Google session so that my searches aren't tied to my Google account.
On Mobile Chrome, if you log into Chrome, you log into your Google account. There's no way to separate the two.