This particular incidence doesn't in any way disprove the argument that just a few flashy features is sometimes what it takes to get a lot of users to flip to a new -and in some cases, inferior- product though. As software history repeatedly acknowledges, that is fundamentally true.
I don't know the current situation but I stopped considering Firefox an alternative or mozilla more trust worthy than Google at that moment.
There are still alternatives but that's more things like the default gnome webbrowser.
At heart Firefox's financing model is as broken as Google's. Yet all the real alternatives aren't investing in the actual development.
Give me a competitive browser and render engine with a patreon button or something similar as only business model and I'll switch. At the end of the day that sort of thing needs financing and Mozilla's strategies aren't at heart different. And I don't know current leadership but I haven't heard the all clear yet. Is firefox currently more privacy conscious? People just assume Firefox is a clean browser but last I checked those assumptions were still marketing and not reality.
Mozilla aren't more holy than the pope, but of course they are more trustworthy and privacy oriented than Chrome. You can see it basically everywhere: containers, cookie management, uBlock support etc. They're not perfect, but they are creating a browser, while Chrome is becoming essentially an ad delivery tool (surprise, surprise, an ad company creating an ad delivery tool).
You know, I was furious about the pocket integration and partnership when it first happened almost six years ago. I didn't like the idea of third-party integrations. I was also mad that they didn't bow to pressure from the community and remove the integration...
But now, I kind of respect Mozilla for keeping it despite the community pressure. They were making money with the partnership, and money from sources OTHER than Google is a good thing.
After two years of this, Mozilla realized that Pocket was making so much money on paid memberships that it was smarter to use some of their war-chest to buy Pocket outright.
That's right, Pocket is owned by Mozilla now and has been for 4 years. [1]
Now it's an important part of their financials. In their Auditors report covering all of 2019 [2], they say "Mozilla’s subscription revenues primarily consist of revenue from subscriptions to a service known as Pocket Premium". The subscription revenue for 2019 was over 14 million, triple what it was in 2018.
This makes me more comfortable because I don't mind, in theory, subscribing to services that actually fund Mozilla.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po... [2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...
Why anyone who considers themselves privacy conscious would deliberately ignore such red flags in favour of Moz coolaid is beyond me.
Though this doesn't mean I have no love for Firefox. It is a great browser when stripped down of all the bloat. Currently use Librewolf as the FF alternative and this gives me my peace.
I'm glad there are alternatives to Chrome though.
If it turns out you cannot completely disable it, and you still want to continue using a Chromium-based browser without FLoC, you will have to use a fork. Vivaldi and Brave have already announced they will remove it, and I'm sure Ungoogled Chromium will do the same.
The biggest crime chrome made was to add a flag that enabled users to use a bottom address bar then completely remove it months later.
This felony was enough to make me export all my passwords and move them to another Chromium-based browser that had the single feature I had longed for. Funny enough it also opened up my eyes to bitwarden and haveibeenpwned. Maybe all this was sort of due.
I occasionally use vanilla Firefox for testing out ads and other links.