you must not have been paying attention the last 3 or so years
Mozilla is doing all kinds of, IMO, unethical things with FireFox that goes against the core value of the mission statement of the Mozilla Foundation.
They are too busy trying to replicate Chrome to care about privacy, security, or basic user rights
I didn't realize what a true mess Mozilla had become.
Looking Glass, Pocket, Banning Plugins based on Political ideology, Backdoors like Normandy, and the STUDIES system, their creation of what amounts to Mozilla version of the Ministry of Truth, Their partnership with Cloudflare to send everyone's DNS to Cloudfare over HTTP, and whole host of other things
I've been using brave because of that: all of that is baked in so my only extension is my password manager
This is the first I have heard of Firefox changing my config settings invisibly in the background. This is obscene. Who on earth thought this was a good idea? The security ramifications are limitless.
I understand all too well that most companies have decided to start A/B testing things on subsets of users, but that doesn't mean you should force that mode of thinking into everything. What a horrible decision. I don't recall ever seeing any news or notifications or checkboxes about studies or "Normandy" at any point.
Are there some other good open source alternatives to Firefox? I remember hearing about Brave but also that it was tied into some cryptocoin nonsense, so I'm not sure what else to look at.