Eh, only if you accept the hype and hyperbole of those that not only hold them to a standard that nobody achieves (which is fine, it gets them closer to that standard) and then use that as a reason to tell people that they should products that are far inferior by those same standards (which is stupid).

I've lost track of the times a Mozilla misstep has resulted in people here saying that's the reason they're switching back to chrome, which I find frankly ridiculous. Also, the whole damn thing is open source, so it's not like they're really hiding anything, people just don't care until someone makes a stink and then all of a sudden everyone cares a lot.

No browser is perfect, but Mozilla is definitely one of the better ones for anyone privacy conscious.

Here we are talking about trust. And a company (Mozilla) that talks a lot about trust and ideals and privacy and then sneaks in tracking by default with a innocent sounding name (studies) is simply not trustworthy to me. They are hiding bad behavior in nice sounding words.

We technical folks get it and can deactivate it.

Every non technical person I know, who still uses firefox does not know and has all the defaults activated, until I change it for them.

So sure, they are still better than google and microsoft, where I just assume that they track everything, but that is a really low standard.

I do not think it is hyperbole. The Cliqz thing where they just handed user browsing behavior to a third party which they had invested in is inexcusable. Google does a ot more tracking but on the flip side I trust their security more than that of some small German startup.

Some of the other incidents were overblown but the Cliqz thing shows of a company culture where user data is something which can be sold to make a profit, which is essentially what they did, and not something which is vital to protect.

Yes, it was many years ago now but I have no reason to think that they cleaned up their company culture.

At that point, I believe Mullvad (who is actually behind Mozilla VPN service) is more trustworthy than Mozilla themselves. And if that is true, why don't just use Mullvad directly?

My understanding if you given money to Mozilla who then give it to mullvad

All Mozilla know is the mullvad username. Mullvad don’t know the credit card details of the purchaser. To link a given vpn ip to a specific credit card would require compromising mullvad and Mozilla.

(Or of course the normal way of fingerprinting which doesn’t rely on IPs)

Now sure you can buy mullvad via cash, but that’s far more work. Using Mozilla as a reseller feels like one more step in the chain