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Firefox had plugins for private browsing since 2008. Only Apple beat them.

One of Chrome's many small victories was including sensible plugins by default, whereas Firefox's best functionality had to be downloaded separately.

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What kind of moving goalpost is that? Chrome 1.0 came with Incognito built-in. Safari had it for three years. Because there may have been a plugin for Firefox a few months before Chrome's release, and followed IE in shipping it, it's the superior privacy option?

1) I didn't say Firefox was better for privacy. I was only pointing out that comparing the browsers based on built-in privacy mode isn't apples-to-apples.

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?

On 2, I would say yes. The default experience matters.

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