I use Ubuntu because no free packages are built into core repos, meaning I don’t need to add dubious repo sources. I don’t like nonfree software, but need it to use my nvidia backed laptop (the oss driver is useless). Sure the fedora community repo is probably okay, but they have no public statements on assurance or security, so who knows.

Humm, Fedora is the source for CentOS and RHEL. Surely most of the contributions to Fedora come from people employed by Red Hat?

Martin Stranksy specifically does most of the Firefox packaging and additionally does a lot of upstream development work to keep Firefox running on Linux.

Which is crazy because Mozilla provides an official flatpak and Fedora has flatpak installed by default, but if Fedora developers want to be masochists they are free to do so.

Fedora build is slightly different that the upstream one; in a way that many FOSS users appreciate: https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/1518

Additionally, it is being done by the same folks who drive development of linux-specific features (like wayland support or video decoding acceleration) anyway.

Ah I always wondered why Firefox releases on my Fedora installs lagged behind official ones.

Its so they can screw with it instead of just shipping what Mozilla released.

The "screwing with it" does not take much time.

Building the binaries themselves do. Mozilla does it few days in advance, so at the release they can push everything (and the binaries are available on the ftp.mozilla.org day before, uusually around 16:00 UTC). Other parties can start building their binaries only after the release.

In case of Fedora, it is pushed into the testing stream and only after positive feedback (or few days) it is pushed into the release. If you want it earlier, you can get the tested builds from bodhi (bodhi.fedoraproject.org). You can also see the status of all builds there.