Mozilla have basically always been exactly the same amount of "better than the competition". As everyone else backslides, they do too, just always at more or less the same moral offset.

It's like this graph I made up:

Getting worse over time, but always the better option at any given moment. (Unless you're in deep enough to have strong opinions about XUL or IceWeasel, in which case you're not my target audience right now.)

I think the difference is that when Mozilla makes a bad product it's rarely because they're trying to make money off me.