I guess I got your point wrong. Now I see. Yes, that makes sense. Even though I don't like, say, Mozilla (I have my reasons), with a popular after-market firmware they may fight for a way for everyone to flash anything - not just their firmware. Just hope this won't end up like it happened with UEFI Secure Boot, where everyone's who's unlucky to have firmware that doesn't support custom keys are stuck with Ubuntu-signed GRUB.
You may not like Mozilla and that's ok. But you still should support them as Mozilla's interests are mostly aligned with the interests of the users.
Yet, as long as everything doesn't end up with some Mozilla-specific partnerships or highly proprietary (in a sense of uniqueness, not source code availability) solutions that are hard to use for anything but FirefoxOS, I think you're right.
Add/Edit: although - in reference to your original comment up the thread - I'd wont say "instead". I think it's what felt wrong to me and got me confused with what you had suggested.
Edit: sure, my wording could be more clear.
I personally liked Mozilla up to the SJW/Eich situation. Since then, every move they've made has been counter to the tenets of free software that JWZ and team instilled. Now, I merely use it because everything else is less-free.
I'm hoping Servo will end up being to Firefox what Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was to Netscape.
They used to be good when they started. I only care about what they do with and to the technology. Whoever is on their team doesn't concern me.
My current issues with Mozilla/Firefox:
- Caving in with adding DRM support, which contradicted their principles because, duh, otherwise users would hop to Chrome to watch Netflix.
- Dropping relatively sane sync-1.1 in favor of sync-1.5. It's as proprietary Firefox-specific solution as it only could be, with internals being a terrible mess I can't call anything but over-engineered. And after more than an year it's still insecure. And they purportedly removed UI for self-hosted sync.
- Promoting Persona/BrowserID, contributing to the very wrong concept that someone's very identity is their account with a third party (email or domain address, as leased by email provider or domain registry). Good thing they put this on hold.
- Simplifying UI where it's unwanted. Say, just recently the "green lock" UI was crippled to the extent it doesn't provide any useful information anymore. To heck with "secure connection", I can see this in the address bar already.
- Bundling more and more stuff into browser, like it's a new Netscape Navigator.
- Gradually showing more and more "hints" and "useful tips" all around, without means to opt out once and for good. Like that annoying popup at the bottom of the "top sites" page on Android (the only UI to disable is about:config).
- Starting to add non-opt-in analytics/tracking anti-features (Adjust on Android release builds).
I feel that those things are not in favor of end-user personal freedoms, but were introduced just because marketing thought they'd look appealing to the audience - who doesn't care about the mission and other stuff that Mozilla likes to mention - or necessary to keep market share. It's just my personal perception, though. I'm by no means objective here.
</rant>
Right now the Firefox dev team is preparing to axe Panorama/Tab-groups[1], one of those superior Firefox-only features, because supposedly only 1% of the users are using it.
That sounds reasonable, until you ask "Has the feature been marketed at all?". When the answer is no, even 1% seems like high adaptation and axing suddenly sounds less like the right answer.
Why didn't they market this feature more? It's absolute genius, and allows an efficient keyboard-only driven browsing experience with almost countless tabs, and it's correspondingly bonkers to be removing it.
I object and would like to provide this link to back it up: https://github.com/mozilla