I don't think it was him in particular, it was just that firing him gave them the opportunity to replace him and his people with people more attuned to their agendas. It's the agendas that should change, the people would follow. They installed a new culture at the top that was more interested in using Firefox as a transitional way to burnish their resumés, and any semblance of core values disappeared in a tangle of projects that were branded as innovation and that everybody could sign. Meanwhile they've been in consistent negative growth in users that is actually starting to look insignificant because their entire userbase is now insignificant. I mean: losing 1%/month of the number of the users they have now seems like a rounding error compared to 1%/month of the users they had 5 years ago.

Anyway, they'll always be guaranteed at least 3% of the market from diehard anti-Google/Microsoft/closed-source users like me, and users from outside the US who are concerned by unaccountable US tech behemoths who are intimately intertwined with the government. With that 3%, they'll be able to fulfill their primary function of being something that Google can claim in an antitrust hearing keeps them from being a monopoly.

1) That's not his name.

2) "Things were better before so let's revert to where we were five years ago" is a terrible strategy.

He's running brave now