Firefox is bleeding market share as it is. Pulling people's favorite search engine out from under them is only going to goose the uptake of Chrome.

Hopefully Google and Mozilla both appreciate they have more to gain by cooperating.

On one of my machines I have Test Pilot enabled (Mozilla's opt-in tool to get user feedback), and I noticed it was returning Bing searches by default, followed by a query of "Were these results useful?"

Read into that what you want.

With current trends, in some years Google will need Mozilla as much as it needs Opera.

Yes. Good riddance IMO. Firefox has become a bloated beast over the years, Mozilla is nothing but obstructionist these days, and the sooner the entire web moves to WebKit the better.