Did they? You can still add Yandex back manually (and trivially), it's just not included with the stock install.
There is a reason to think the actual goal of all that radio silence was preventing people from trivially switching to Yandex manually in advance of the change.
It's also in the right click menu for the address bar.
Why does Mozilla need to include Yandex as a default option?
The problem is not inclusion by default, the problem is unwarranted unconditional removal, whether it is default or not, and whether it is needed or not. Mozilla has decided the pretend it happened “by itself”, but it was their decision, and they had an option to switch people to non-sponsored Yandex search.
¹) http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://support.mozilla.org/en-...
I frankly don't care. I don't use Yandex, but if I did, I'd be really pissed off at this move. Firefox shouldn't be including only search engines that pay a fee; they should be including all search engines that their users might find useful.
Almost all browsers are free. All major and minor ones are free.
A legit change in some deal does not explain several aspects of this update.
When something doesn't add up, you are supposed to scrutinize it, not just assume it's fine. If it was fine, then why wasn't there an honest explanation?
Mozilla did a bad thing. If our speculations about the why are wrong, it doesn't change anything about what is wrong with this update.
But even the speculation is fair game in this case because the update lacks all the normal and expected justification and explaination of any other merge request. Feel free to explain the above-board reason they made quite this nature of update in quite this peculiar way.
What other updates to your browser should be ok to just take blindly with no explanation? The immagination staggers.
That's... not how things work. If you're not happy about something, you should complain about it. That's the only way that people's preferences become known, and changes can be made. If we all constantly hopped from product to product when the product we're currently using does something we didn't like, we'd very quickly run out of options.
All contracts signed with Russians are up for review and likely annulment.
You people seem to be totally brainwashed by corporate bullshit.