Sadly I agree. Which is a shame, because in my opinion they _do_ actually leapfrog them both in privacy.
Any browser is a massive, rich attack surface with bugs, but Chrome has been cutting edge in its sandboxing, privilege separation, and overall security.
True, Chrome is and has always been a Google marketing vehicle, where the user is the product. But has Mozilla always been at the forefront of privacy, even? Something as basic as private browsing, let's see:
April 29, 2005 Safari 2.0 Private Browsing
December 11, 2008 Google Chrome 1.0 Incognito
March 19, 2009 Internet Explorer 8 InPrivate Browsing
June 30, 2009 Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Private Browsing
Apple, Google, and Microsoft all beat Mozilla to the punch.
One of Chrome's many small victories was including sensible plugins by default, whereas Firefox's best functionality had to be downloaded separately.
2) On a related note, Firefox left out lots of features because there were well-supported, popular plugins that covered the same thing. Whenever a browser gets built-in ad blocking, should we say that all the other browsers are worse privacy options because they chose to leave those as third-party plugins?