Why is the market share of Firefox in Germany so much higher?

Yeah that's right, but people also use Google to search and use Windows on the desktop.

It may be a factor, but it is no the root and the concept is not privacy, though. The root is the 1983 supreme court decision around informational self-determination. The right has constitutional rank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determinati...

Privacy is a part of that, but not all of it.

A second cultural aspect is that Germans tend to have higher trust into the state, but lower trust in companies when it comes to such subjects, while in the US, this is reversed.

I'd also guess this played a part. Not just the heise publications, also many "lower-end" magazines with more popular reach were touting Mozilla Suite and then Firefox a lot to the professional and enthusiast crowd - who then put Firefox on their relatives etc PCs, so a large audience is familiar with it. Not sure other languages had such media that much?

Combine that with an attitude that's maybe not chasing trends that much if things work, maybe less advertising impact by Google (although they have the nudges in their products here too, but I feel like I see more in english spaces), and people stick to it longer?