Your assumptions are correct.
It's amazing how far apart I got from every single one of Mozilla's visions, from using Firefox as my main browser 8 years ago.
I love the fact that—as an example—as I travel Google shows me tools that I'll be interested in, like a currency converter, translate + word of the day in the local language, etc. etc.
I would absolutely hate having my main browser constantly forget who I am. I feel almost blessed every time I visit a website that I can log in with one click (or I'm already logged in), and when I sign up or buy stuff I can autofill my name, email, address, and credit card without having to start from scratch.
I'm not ready to give up extreme convenience and lots of time for the ideal of safeguarding my privacy with Google or Apple.
So just use something else! Oh, wait, you want to check your official university e-mail? That's provided by Google now. Oh, wait, you wanted to check city transit information? That's provided by Google now.
(I'd probably use Google for the latter anyway, but it'd be nice to be able to pretend that I had a choice.)
Google's own policies prevent it from doing data mining on GSuite accounts, like official email provided by Google in universities or companies or businesses. I'm sure other providers have similar policies as well. Unless you don't trust Google even a bit, your comparison on the email provider point is useless. I prefer separating things out and examining them instead of combining everything into one single worrisome name.
Yes, but if I sign up from my cell phone, I'd like to have that info on my desktop browser automatically and on other computers, so no.
> And currency converter, translations, word of the day, etc can all be done as browser extensions.
Sure, but what a pain. I wouldn't go through the pain of searching, installing, configuring, and then removing an extension for each one of of those things. I just don't care about any of them that much, it was just nice having them there automatically.
I'm pretty sure Safari will sync that info using iCloud, and I think Firefox has its own sync mechanism that can be used for this.
Or you could use any one of the numerous password managers (I use 1Password).
> Sure, but what a pain. I wouldn't go through the pain of searching, installing, configuring, and then removing an extension for each one of of those things.
If you actually care about having any of those, it's really not hard to search for and install extensions. You seem to be overplaying the difficulty involved here, especially for something of such relative low utility.
I prefer to stay anonymous, but use the "real" FF occasionally for stuff I need to be logged in for. Browsing links friends send me, or checking something with a quick google search is something that I'd rather stay anonymous for, so I prefer having it available.
It looks like they're scrambling to try to stay afloat and miss and miss again.