CEO pay also isn't a criticism of the browser, its an indication that the organization either rewards failure, or sees its current situation as success. Either way, it doesn't bode well for the future.
Did Firefox lose marketshare because of:
Google intentionally making their sites worse in Firefox?
The lack of multiprocess for so long?
No support for Google Earth until 2020?
Google shipping a polyfill that made YouTube.com 3x slower in Firefox and Safari for years?
The move to WebExtensions happening too late, resulting in burnout and lost interest from the extension community because they had already ported their extensions to e10s?
Slack going out of their way to use a non-standard SDP format thats only supported in Chrome, resulting in no other browsing supporting video calls?
Microsoft Teams also does the same thing.
Mobile overtaking desktop, where Chrome reigns supreme as a platform default?
Because it seems whatever technical “vision” Mozilla used to have back then have more or less vanished, while Brave seems to have quite a bit of it.
Edit: Back in the days I loved Firefox because it was made by the Mozilla foundation, which stood for things I found important, which I trusted and “loved”.
Today Firefox is still made by the Mozilla foundation, but that entity has little in common with the Mozilla of old besides the name.
In that regard holding on to Firefox “because Mozilla” is IMO largely holding on to a delusion or a lie.
I was myself in denial over this for a long period of time before I realized that my “love” for Firefox was no longer real. I was just using it out of a misplaced sense of obligation, not because it genuinely made me excited, like it used to back in the days.
Mozilla failed in its mission. Let’s hope someone else can find their place.
I haven't been really using Firefox recently, so there may have been some improvements I have missed. But they have made mistakes and missed opportunities. They probably should have made ad-blocking the default (same as Brave does), but can they do that if they are funded by Google? They probably should't have ended support for legacy add-ons. They probably shouldn't have freaked out their privacy-conscious part of their user-base by that Mr. Robot promo...
Firefox already blocks a lot of ads by blocking tracking scripts. Including a cosmetic adblocker like Brave would lead to worse compat and broken experiences.
> They probably should't have ended support for legacy add-ons.
They should've actually. Firefox was a single-process mess for years with poor sandboxing, because Mozilla was scared of breaking everyones add-ons. The move to WebExtensions was the right one, if a bit late. If the whiners got their way, every extension would be breaking right now because of Fission. The old model also had no permission system.