Firefox needs to become the default browser for web developers.
They need to go all-in on developer tooling.
The manifest v3 issue may help by poaching technical users from chrome.
They also need to stop being so "principled" about features such as WebMidi. If I have to keep another browser around certain websites that Firefox is too principled to support then why bother using Firefox at all.
They can't out engineer Google on dev tooling, or the dev ecosystem. They just don't have the resources.
Chrome dev tools is vast and very rapidly evolving. Google has large evangelists teams dedicated to explaining dev tools or web tech in general. They are everywhere, on Twitter, Youtube, blogs, conferences, in web standards proposals.
It's Google all the way down. If I'm not mistaken, Mozilla doesn't even have any evangelists anymore.
Yet I still use Mozilla MDN far more than all of those google resources put together. They're not dead yet.
I'm trying to think of a good exit plan, but I don't see any.
Switching to Chromium, which would be a humiliating defeat, solves nothing. Chromium + privacy is Brave.
Donating the entire project to the larger open source community won't do miracles either. It's highly questionable how many contributions will be made, but that's not the real problem.
The real problem is that there's no reach. It's not an engineering problem. If you can't push a browser as a default or plug it from a billion user platform, you're out of the game.