Mozilla has no real power over the web. Google, Microsoft, and Apple have the power (look at the names associated with EME DRM - what a surprise). Mozilla has an illusion of power, which is tolerated by the other actors because it makes everyone happy. But no one should mistake it for real leverage.
Actually, I decided that hellacious startup times weren't worth it.
All of your hyperbole is a spin-master's way of saying that Chome and Safari beat out Mozilla because, for a significant amount of time, Firefox sucked compared to them.
This said, if they go back to their roots as "ayatollah of open web and open source", I might consider them again; but until they're just another ad-backed bureaucracy, I might as well stick to a better one.
That's FSF. And guess what? Everyone hates it! [0]
Nicest thing about Mozilla is that they have a great balance of ideology and being practical.
[0] Of course not everyone, specially not me. But you get my point.
Google did well technically on Chrome, but investing a huge amount of marketing dollars (like bundling chrome with other nice things like toolbars) didn't hurt them.
They may concede if they think it will help their great goal.
But I'd rather they saved that power for the next fight rather than going kamikaze on this. I'm sure there will be a next fight, and there's a good chance that it will be something smaller, or they'll have another major browser on their side.
That's not right either. It's the users that have the power. Users can pick which browsers they use and which sites they visit.
There was essentially no boycott of EME-shipping browsers (Chrome and Internet Explorer). That shows that we, the people on the internet, did not care enough to fight EME.
EME isn't fought by talking about it and hoping someone like Mozilla will kill it. We would have had to actually do something ourselves, and a successful boycott of Chrome and Internet Explorer would have killed EME very effectively.
Or most users weren't aware of their choices. Mozilla could have campaigned to make users aware of it and go back to Firefox. Instead they chose the other direction. :-(
I've talked about this for a long time and tried to convince people about it. People just don't seem to care. I'm surprised at how much attention this is getting now, all of a sudden!
Or do you think that because of Android or something, Google would be able to stop the DRM when every other browser/device supported it?
It was just a few years ago that Mozilla though so highly of themselves that they thought they could use their market position to force the world to change from h.264 to VP3 (with hopes that Google would gift the world VP8 later on).
They failed at reading the situation then, and are failing again now.