Unpopular opinion: Firefox is allowing itself to be phased out, and contributing to a less free internet, with their business moves. It was hugely upsetting when they axed their dev team mid-pandemic.
Firefox only got popular because it was so much better than IE at the time.
Now Chrome and Safari are the preinstalled on most devices or are pushed on you if they are not. They are also good enough or better that users don't have enough incentive to switch, especially with ad blockers working just fine on the competition (for now...). And Google won't allow Chrome to fall behind in a meaningful way.
There is not much market opportunity to compete against the monopolistic distribution channels that Apple and Google can leverage.
> This would be a decent point if nobody had any interest in chromium alternatives and Firefox was a new upstart brand, neither of which are true.
What? The dominance of the mobile space by one of their competitors, who pre-installs their own browser, and who advertised said browser for free on the most visited website on the planet (google.com) for years, is absolutely relevant regardless of how old Mozilla is.
And the world isn't like HN, most people don't care that much about their browsers, and don't even know what "chromium" is.
They said they did the axing due to the long term viability of Firefox. So it would be ironic if this axing had such bad PR that it had a worse effect than having too many heads.
Firefox only got popular because it was so much better than IE at the time.
Now Chrome and Safari are the preinstalled on most devices or are pushed on you if they are not. They are also good enough or better that users don't have enough incentive to switch, especially with ad blockers working just fine on the competition (for now...). And Google won't allow Chrome to fall behind in a meaningful way.
There is not much market opportunity to compete against the monopolistic distribution channels that Apple and Google can leverage.