I stand by what I said, and you're misunderstanding my point. I'm not comparing mullvad to google, it was an analogy. Plus a browser handles processes in the Application layer (layer 7) in the OSI model, and therefore is a very essential part of the chain of services required for telecommunication. This is a first year cybersecurity concept.

Mullvad does collect a very small amount of info; see their privacy policy., especially in regards to payment. Seeing that most users probably don't use Monero, Mullvad does have a small amount of info on them. However, this is not what my point is.

While this is a very mininal amount of data, my point is that consolidating more information points into 1 company is a bad idea, no matter the company, and no matter the degree of data collection. You cookies, browsing history, dns record, etc. are all now potentially linked to your payment info as well as http requests, tls encrypted traffic, and network activity via the same company via both browser and VPN.

Side note: a similar opsec strategy to prevent this is defederation, which denies complete control to any 1 entity. (Lemmy!)

If mullvad ever became unhinged (which I doubt would happen, but let's entertain the thought), your entire internet access would be compromised at the browser and the network level, rather than just one or the other. You can break this up over multiple trustworthy applications to fix this. Another analogy would be to use librewolf on linux with Mullvad VPN, which are all tustworthy and come with a degree of separation as well. Now if mullvad were to go crazy, it would not affect your OS or your browser, since you were using librewolf and linux. There are less information points to work with.