Firefox 4 was supposed to be our response to Google Chrome. We were feature driven. "Firefox 4 will be released with features A, B and C". And it took us a stupid amount of time to get there. Firefox 4 was supposed to be great. But no devtools, no multiprocess … compared to Chrome it was bad.

So much work and stress went into this release, it took us a loooong time, people were exhausted, and the result was mediocre. Electrolysis was hard. Hardware acceleration challenging. And all these new HTML5 features… gosh.

But we had to get much much better, because the Google's engineer were killing it. The race was hard. And we also needed a Firefox-on-mobile plan. With less engineers, and a much smaller budget.

Important people left after Firefox 4. John Lilly left. And Mozilla hired product managers and such. More marketing etc etc. Things changed. We moved to a new version of Firefox every 6 weeks (that was a good move though).

We basically went from the "savior of the internet" to "google chrome followers".