Look I get it, Google is evil and it totally makes sense that they secretly control Firefox by threatening to take away Mozilla's $500 million a year royalty payments for making Google the default search in Firefox, and this idea matches up with your worldview of how shady the tech industry is. They're probably doing it with Apple too!
But please, just trust me on this one, it's absolute horseshit. Google doesn't need to control Mozilla with money in order to dominate the web. Or, rather, they can and do dominate them by spending more than double1 Mozilla's yearly revenue on advertising for Chrome alone, let alone the engineering cost in building and maintaining it. Not through the search royalties.
"Why hasn't Firefox shipped with an ad blocker then, huh? It's so obvious!!!" Well, yeah actually, I agree with you and a lot of Mozilla folks did too. It's always been a thing that Mozilla has been split on because, you see, the reason is that Mozilla just kinda sucks! I love it to death, gave it 8 years of my life, and I still thought it sucked and left!
See, the thing about shipping an adblocker by default is that, if you view yourself the steward of the open web, you don't just get to care about the users and their needs. You also need to care about the websites and their needs, too. And websites need to fund themselves, and while lots of sites have moved to paywalls, subscriptions, becoming platforms with revenue sharing, advertising is still by far the most successful at scale.
And that's part of what paralyzed Mozilla leadership for a long time; if we shipped an ad blocker while we still had 30% browser market share, it would be an immediate kick in the nuts to every site providing free content subsidized by advertising, which in turn would have downstream effects on the accessibility of free content, and in turn in the content available to folks without disposable income.
They also feared another Do Not Track debacle. Do Not Track was supposed to be the opt-in flag that advertisers respected and disabled tracking for, and it had (at least publicly) buy-in from both the major browser makers and the advertising industry. And then Microsoft decides IE10 will default the preference to be on, which spooks all the advertisers who back out of the system. Mozilla feared escalating the war on bypassing ad blockers by making them widespread and default.
Honestly I don't think these were good enough reasons not to do it, especially not in the face of a competitor like Chrome where sitting in your Athenian Senate debating The Future Of The Web all day does fuck-all against a foe who has effectively an Infinite Money machine in their office lobby. But they aren't stupid questions to ask and they certainly weren't asked by a suspicious person wearing a Google-branded fedora who whispers to the CEO occasionally.
Mozilla's problems lie deeper than this, too, in the same way that most flaws in companies do: committing to poorly-made decisions, following fads, specific people with specific biases who happen to have decision-making power. You would be shocked just how many "Why did X company do Y? It's so supcious" situations boil down to one nameless executive who is trying to impress their rich friends.
Anywho conspiracy theories are bullshit, please use Firefox it's legitimately a great browser and good for the health of the web.
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Vague estimates circa 2015, accuracy reduced because, well, I quit lmao