What makes you think there is a connection between Firefox market share and the decisions happening at Mozilla?
This is not 2005. No matter how good Firefox is—I'd argue it's still the best browser out there—Chrome, Edge, and Safari are backed by the biggest corporations in the history of the world behind them. It's not a meritocracy. The decline could be inevitable.
By analogy, we could look at the decline of film studios. The quality of major studio films has declined with the popularity of Marvel films. From the perspective of people that care about the industry from a critical perspective, it's a disaster. From the perspective of Disney, they are merely leveraging their advantages in existing market share, brand awareness, and advertising to beat everyone else.
It's hard to show causation, in general, for anything, but here's a theory.
Mozilla is making decisions to remove power-user features, which is alienating power-users (we've got a whole comment-section of them right here).
This doesn't directly kill marketshare, because there aren't that many power-users. But every time Mozilla alienates another web developer, one less website works in Firefox. When websites stop working right, that's when marketshare really drops.
Also, I'm not convinced the quality of major studio films has dropped as a result of the Marvel era. It just seems that way because 1) we tend to forget the worst films when looking back into the past and 2) Covid really is hurting studio budgets.
> I'd argue it's still the best browser out there—Chrome, Edge, and Safari are backed by the biggest corporations in the history of the world behind them
You didn't define what makes a browser 'best' so hard to argue there (although I would argue otherwise, at least on Mac, Firefox is nowhere near being the 'best' browser if by 'best' you mean fastest, most battery efficient and best native OS integrations).
Also Mozilla is 'backed' by the same corporation 'backing' Chrome (90% of its revenue coming from Google).
So I believe case could be made that there is a very real correlation between Firefox market share and the decisions happening at Mozilla.
No; blame is a moral concept, and I did not invoke it.
You seem to think Mozilla could have competed with the likes of Google and Microsoft if only they would have made better decisions, or because Firefox once had the largest market share. This is far from obvious.
If a company is incapable of competing, could that mean that whoever is in charge of it is incompetent and must be replaced so that the company can compete again?
When Firefox was dominant, Chrome came from nothing, competed and then dethroned Mozilla. If Mozilla is this incapable, they either have to change people at the top and make better decisions, or just die and stop pretending and selling lies to its users.
I agree, there was a perception that Mozilla was, not just a browser vendor, but a tech company and an (successful) outsider against giants like Google or Microsoft.
This image was gone the moment Mozilla via its foundation started to push partisan politics after the eviction of Eich. Using Mozilla's Firefox instead of browser XYZ was also a militant (but non partisan) act.
The removal of the Rust, Servo teams and the MDN team, abandoning Firefox OS, all avenues of possible growth, completely mismanaged since Eich's departure, didn't help either.
