In 2013/2014 when Snowden started whiste-blowing we were hoping for Mozilla to monetize privacy, but they never did. They only recently made some very poor attempts at private email, VPN and integrated some DoH. They were very hesitant for any cryptocurrencies integration. I would be happy to pay for a serious VPN and email service (remember Mozilla owns Thuderbird) with promises like Tutanota or Proton have. They could have acquired them, but instead they acquired pocket. Mozilla had the perfect brand and enough userbase to do it. Mozilla started doing that work 5-7 years too late and did too little to be meaningful. I feel they are doomed now and their space is shrinking and there's no future for Firefox in the long term.

There's a lot that can be added here:

Mozilla promised to opensource pocket server and never did.

They promised to hire someone full-time for Thunderbird, but never did. afair there is a German company that has full-time developer working on Thuderbird.

They promised a VPN... yes, delivered something.

They promised anonymous email, I know they were giving access by invites, but nothing more about it.

They promised to unfork Tor browser and integrate Tor into Firefox, they were even running a few Tor nodes.

Remember how hyped everyone here was for Servo in Firefox and electron competitor?

MDN could have integration with GH or GL and educational content for web development, they literally had resources, brand and ability to join an online university and give degrees or at least serious bootcamps. Mozilla was a meaningful brand to do it.

They had a lot of opportunities to sell privacy, we literally demanded it from them, but they weren't interested in listening. Instead they delivered 6 rebrands each breaking my muscle memory.

Do you remember how they advised EU to regulate monopoly on the webbrowser market? There was time when they had all ability, but 0 will to keep it this way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu