[ramblenode]

Mozilla created their own high performance programming language in order to build a faster web engine from scratch (all of which has been largely successful). They developed and shipped a mobile OS well into the reign of Android and iOS. You could argue about the placement of their priorities, but they have definitely thrown their weight behind ambitious projects.

[moz23]

Ambitious in a technical sense - yes. But not ambitious in a "protect the users" sense (see e.g. tracking protection/ad blocking), and also not ambitious in a business sense (i.e. try to do something beyond sell users/traffic to the highest bidding search engine).

(Perhaps they could have made money by selling devices with the OS, but that didn't seem to be the aim there, as far as devices being only sold by partners.)

This is very much the stereotypical engineer approach: trying to engineer your way into revenue. Yes you need strong technology to keep users, but there's a lot more to business than the tech stack and quality.