For me, the alarming fact is that this "privacywise" option was not the firs one chosen. Instead, they went with a "privacyunwise" option as a default, and only backed out because of user uproar. Bad Mozilla!
Thanks for the replies, everyone. I have only used ImageMagick lightly, for e. g. resizing or merging simple bitmaps, and I never found it lacking. However, I recognize that there are users who need more.
So, a question: why? Just so that there is an alternative (not that there is anything wrong with that), or is there an issue with ImageMagick that discourages some people from using it?