I'm sure Firefox developers read Hacker News, so I'm going to talk here.
I have "Provide Search Suggestions" disabled. All 3 of the options underneath them are disabled, because search suggestions are disabled. This makes sense.
THEN, I click "change settings for other address bar suggestions" and in *THERE* everything is in there, INCLUDING "Contextual suggestions".
What do you think the first disabling of suggestions meant? You're searching without my consent. If I would have consented, it would have been in that first check box. What are you guys doing? What happened to the Firefox I trust and choose over Google to avoid the monoculture?
When I was still a Firefox user, I just ended up blocking any domain owned by mozilla. And by 'when I was still a Firefox user' I mean 'until approximately 12 hours ago.' What priorities and values Mozilla has left I don't seem to share.
What have you switched to?
I'm currently using Brave to reply to this comment because it was already on my drive. I don't like Brave's philosophy and I don't like its proximity to Google. I'm using it as a stop gap till I find something better.
It's going to take me a few weeks of research to pick my new permanent browser. I want something far-removed from Google, but with an active enough developer community that it doesn't fall apart after an OS update or turn out to have a back-door hidden in the code base.
Firefox is alive because of Google money. It looks like they don't like this single-source dependency too much, and want to find their own monetization model. Unfortunately, it's looks like it's the same old one - sell user's eyeballs (and maybe also tracking data, who knows) to advertisers.
I'm using Firefox 93.0 on macOS and I don't see "contextual suggestions" anywhere.
In the address bar suggestions I do have everything ticked. The full list is: Browsing history, Bookmarks, Open tabs, Shortcuts and Search engines.
Edit: having now read the linked article, I realise this is a US-only (anti-)feature, at least for now.