In theory you are correct. However, I wonder how much of Google paying is actually 'we better have a competitor to avoid anti-trust' rather than paying for the searchbar.
Mozilla should have gotten a smaller amount last time due to falling behind in marketshare, yet that did not happen.
> Mozilla should have gotten a smaller amount last time due to falling behind in marketshare
That assumes that the amount of money in the market stayed the same. But it didn't: the number of users of the internet grew. So it's possible that the actual benefit to Google of Mozilla's users using their search engine grew.
Disclaimer: used to work for Mozilla, not privy to details of the Google agreements.
There is a pretty big difference between Google directly paying you to exist using money it makes from ads in a different product segment and making money for displaying ads through Google.
I don't, but other such things are often structured as revenue share agreements, in which case it would not be exactly "ads in a different product segment", but rather "a fraction of the ad revenue directly attributable to Firefox". At which point it's really no different from how AdWords or the like work.
Half of Google's revenue is paying people for traffic from AdSense to browser search bars and all in between.
Is my business nonviable just because it's funded by Google ad placements?