Default config of Firefox include advertisement and "participate in studies". That means intense tracking. You can disable all of that garbage, but most do not even know, that it exists and is enabled by default (along with telemetry).
Yes, I'm sure the author does their best, but I doubt this is their day job. Meaning if there is an update during working hours he might not get to update his fork until several hours later or if he is on vacation it might be days or weeks. What happens when he abandons the project? Usually the fork projects wind down after some time and there is no indication for the users that they are using abandonware with God knows how many missing security patches.
Of course there is ideal world where we wouldn't have to make these choices, but at least I am going to stick with Firefox until something actually bad happens.
Secondly there is a reason why nightly channel exists. It is because it is not stable. Yeah, back in the day I ran nightly for years without seeing an issue, but also I'm not really sure if there was any benefits.
As far as I am aware the dev channel is just main Firefox with better webdev console/tools. So I don't know if that has anything going for it security wise compared to the main.
It does have a "Send usage data" option that is enabled by default.
There is also a "Studies" option which I had not seen before.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-opt-out-studies-fir...
Yup. This sort of behavior, of where stuff like this just creeps in with an update, is why I would never consider donating to mozilla at its current shape.
(along with the fact, that they continue to reduce engineers, but increase the CEO salary, despite marketshare is falling)
Mozilla does only their bullshit outreachy and woke bullshit instead of focusing on their only product that matter. I don't really care if their engineers are women, trans, non-binary, black, hispanic, indian etc. All I wanted a top notch browser that's not based on chromium, but that was too much to ask.
I miss the old Mozilla when they made the New York Times ad with their donors names on there.
Mozilla lost another user...I guess is time to increase their CEOs salary!