That's not Mozilla's only or most significant misstep.
CEO drama, Hello, Pocket, UI indecisiveness, repeated feature removal over objections, breaking everyone's addons first with the XULening then with the addon cert fiasco, opt-out telemetry, force-pushing addons without affirmative consent, opt-out advertising, buying into scummy tracking outfits like cliqz (and trying to hide it), poor prioritization, lack of focus..
If there's ever a choice between giving the user more control and transparency or taking it away, Mozilla seems to take the latter option.
Outside of HN, no one I've ever talked to has mentioned any of those as reasons for using Chrome. The two most common reasons I've heard are "dunno" followed distantly by "I use ten hundred thousand million tabs and Firefox crashed on me once fifteen years ago."
I suspect the rise of mobile browsing, with Chrome as the default, plus users' Google account having strong integration with Chrome--not to mention Google pushing Chrome across all of their properties--have a lot more to do with Chrome's popularity than a button on Firefox's toolbar that you don't like.
Mozilla still hasn't figured out that they are synonymous with Firefox and until that happens you can expect the marketshare to further deplete. Meanwhile, Chrome gain little by little until Mozilla will be utterly irrelevant, which is a huge pity because we really need an independent browser.
I'm still writing this using Firefox but Chrome is now also running all the time on this machine because of one of my private projects which requires web midi (and which, according to Mozilla can not be implemented safely, though Chrome is existence proof that this is nonsense).
Wow, I had actually forgotten about a ton of this stuff, shines a different light on how hard it’s been working to gain trust and be the “privacy browser” in recent years.
> breaking everyone's addons first with the XULening then with the addon cert fiasco
You're forgetting back when they first switched to the rapid release cycle they broke plugins every release. After 3-4 release breaking half my plugins each time I switched to Chromium. It was when they dumped the XUL based extensions and finally had a stable extension API that I switched back.
CEO drama, Hello, Pocket, UI indecisiveness, repeated feature removal over objections, breaking everyone's addons first with the XULening then with the addon cert fiasco, opt-out telemetry, force-pushing addons without affirmative consent, opt-out advertising, buying into scummy tracking outfits like cliqz (and trying to hide it), poor prioritization, lack of focus..
If there's ever a choice between giving the user more control and transparency or taking it away, Mozilla seems to take the latter option.