I could be inferring something the OP didn't intend - but I took their comment to indicate Mozilla should "stay in their lane" and focus on making an incredible web browser - not some side project/distraction that will inevitably fail.

Additionally, firefox has an abysmal market share currently, about 3%, not much different than Samsung Browser of Opera. If Mozilla want to make a competitive browser, it may not be the best time to devote resources to having a me too offering that rides on a current wave of interest

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Mozilla has been distracted with side projects and posturing for so many years... one has to wonder if they can even find their way back at this point.

What would Firefox have to include to draw people back? The browser is solid, IME, so I'm not sure what they'd be doing if not their side projects. Do they need to figure out some way to market it as a viable alternative to Chromes?

Well, for starters - they need to figure out why all the browser skinners (Edge, Brave, etc) keep using Chromium as a base instead of Firefox. I don't pretend to know the reasons - but I would wager there's some pretty good reasons Chromium is dominating that space.

Microsoft and Google are at total odds with each other - I can't imagine using Chromium as a base sent people skipping down the halls in Redmond.

One thing that they could do is make Firefox at least as responsive on iOS as Safari is.

I know that browsers on iOS are forced to use WebKit (although that might change soon[1]). But Safari is also using WebKit, and the lag that I get in Firefox when opening a new tab is testing my commitment to them.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/14/apple-considering-non-w...

not pissing off power users - who are the only people who use firefox - in an utterly futile attempt to attract the general population.

this plea - that many people had made over the years - falls on deaf ears. mozilla is now ran by the kind of people who knows better than its users what we need, and we're wrong if we disagree.

Important. Firefox got where it was partially because many of us installed it for coworkers and relatives and everyone else, not because ordinary users sat down to try to figure out what browsers existed and which one was better.

Towards the end, Firefox was an easy sell.

And, as you write, today they don't care or even actively resist when we try to help.

Copying Chrome perfectly won't get any their users back.

Funding all kinds of weird side projects won't get users back.

Amazing, resource-efficient skinning might get some people back.

Tree Style Tags and other plugins working amazingly well might get some users back.

And when they start listen and fix the things we report things can improve very rapidly.

There are also probably a number of other improvements that can be done (I've advocated looking into doing the same as asm.js, but with html and css: something like a put meta-tag announcing html-lite or html/asm or something in the head, use a restricted set of css and html that is rendering friendly and only uses these well thought out js-libraries and we will pass your code down a much more efficient rendering branch!)

Bring back the things that made us power users love it and generally start caring more about bug reports.

Firefox market share is 7.1% on desktop - not great, but more than double the aggregate, which should tell you something. Competing with Chrome on Android or Safari on iOS is virtually impossible. The ability to sync bookmarks, passwords, credit cards, etc. through the primary browser on Android to the desktop, and/or vice versa, ended the competition. The problem for Firefox/Mozilla is that the landscape for distributing a browser changed in a highly unfavorable way for an independent developer. We're not going back to the old days without a competitive mobile landscape (not happening).

Now, that doesn't put Mozilla's decisions or operations beyond scrutiny, but set expectations reasonably. Firefox is already a competitive browser, and even dramatically leap-frogging Chrome would do nothing to market share.

Pretty much this. A 4% share would be better than a 3% share. The browser is still good, but the wider company just does weird shit.

I hope Firefox devs for the code and establish their own foundation, Id give Firefox money, but not Mozilla - I’m not interested in funding a bunch of wannabe tech bros weird exploration of projects destined to fail.

Not really, no. Marketshare is currently split roughly 3% Firefox, 18.7% Safari, 78.3% Chromium variants (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, etc). If Firefox disappeared almost nothing would change, which is not good. Ideally Firefox's share should at least equal Safari's so developers can't ignore it with impunity, and in a perfect world it'd be split evenly three ways so Google can't steamroll through when Mozilla and Apple disagree with them.

Safari is going to drop big time when alt browsers become mandated on iOS by the EU. We will have chrome and chrome forks only.

I too think that unfortunately, this is what will happen. There's practically no chance of Firefox for iOS making significant headway.

The only silver lining is that this might land Google in an antitrust lawsuit that forces them to spin Chromium and Blink off into a Mozilla-like nonprofit with wholly independent leadership, which is about the best outcome possible in a single-web-engine world.

I'm old enough to remember when it was netscape or IE... thats it.

so I see today as fairly diverse