@louis @Unatributed Louis, I know about Mozilla fundings and they went that path since the donation one, as used to be in the past, did not work.
The data input on the search bar and sent to partners are part of the Firefox Suggest functionality which can be deactivated as well (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-suggest). That's not something shady imho.
As I told before, users can choose to use any other Firefox fork on the market if they don't trust the Mozilla Foundation (I am using Librewolf myself).