| > There are other factors at play than managerial incompetence: I agree there's no single point of failure, but IMO what made Firefox (and Mozilla before it) different was that it was different. they played catch-up against Chrome with the result that they did not gain new users and lost many of the older ones I still use Firefox on desktop, but on mobile first they removed the extensions from their mobile browser, then announced they would only support WebExtensions API, removing a ton of features from existing extensions, then they started purging "controversial" extensions (as in controversial in the eyes of Google) from their addons web site, that basically made Firefox a worse Chrome. The nails in the coffin for me have been laying off the entire devtools, MDN and servo development teams and the ads in the search bar. All of this started happening soon after Eich left. I'm not saying Eich alone could save Firefox, he's also a person I dislike on a human level and he's probably more troubles than he's worth for a company, but my opinion is that Firefox "new" mindset post Eich disappointed its true fans that were mainly developers and you don't recover from that. EDIT: I understand the need to make money, but are Pocket Premium or reselling VPNs the right way for a browser vendor? |