Usually, when a CEO heads an explicitly sinking ship, the CEO will be removed and someone will be brought in to turn around the company.
No idea why that hasn’t happened.
What? The dominance of the mobile space by one of their competitors, who pre-installs their own browser, and who advertised said browser for free on the most visited website on the planet (google.com) for years, is absolutely relevant regardless of how old Mozilla is.
And the world isn't like HN, most people don't care that much about their browsers, and don't even know what "chromium" is.
Anyhow, the point I’m making is that I don’t agree that it is impossible to compete with trenched competition.
Firefox has some prior momentum themselves, they’re not quite an upstart.
2008-2010 John Lilly
2010-2013 Gary Kovacs
2014 Brendan Eich
2014-2019 Chris Beard
2020-now Mitchel Baker
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Firefox only got popular because it was so much better than IE at the time.
Now Chrome and Safari are the preinstalled on most devices or are pushed on you if they are not. They are also good enough or better that users don't have enough incentive to switch, especially with ad blockers working just fine on the competition (for now...). And Google won't allow Chrome to fall behind in a meaningful way.
There is not much market opportunity to compete against the monopolistic distribution channels that Apple and Google can leverage.