>We can still debate as to why they have been in a death spiral for the last 10 years

Hmm...I wonder what could have happened almost ten years ago to do this? Oh yeah...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...

Go woke, go broke. It may take some time for it to happen but sooner or later it will. It is inevitable once you start choosing for political associations and political goodwill over actual technical skills and knowledge.

Snarky rhyming schemes aren’t much of a political philosophy.

> Snarky rhyming schemes aren’t much of a political philosophy.

Slogans have always existed. Poking at them and calling them snarky doesn't stop them from being condensed talking points. Or from being an observable reality.

A little over ten years ago Firefox was doing well. In the time since then it has not fared well at all. Looking at what has changed since then is a very valid thing to do.

a) you shouldn't be demoted because of your political donations, as long as you're not donating to do harm - whether Eich was donating to a harmful organization is debatable

b) This has nothing to do with "wholeness" and everything to do with Google pushing chrome as hard as they can.

- There is android phones, and I am pretty sure some Google services would advertise it to you - Chromebooks are used in most public schools across America

c) Eich later went on to found Brave. Have you ever seen anyone in the real world use Brave? They passed 50M users one year ago: https://brave.com/2021-recap/

Wikipedia states 63% of people used the internet worldwide in 2021: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_...

that is 4.9 billion people. So, brave has a market share of, drum roll, 1%.

In conclusion, the argument that Eich would have led them to success is not a good one, in my opinion.

Firefox share loss since I left. Yes, it was losing share before I left too. Counterfactuals aside, growing Brave to 57M MAU from 0 wasn't a minor thing, and we are still growing in spite of Chrome's market power. Firefox (click on legend items for other browsers) is still losing share.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2014...

I don't think "wokeness" had anything to do with it.

Their leadership simply became captive to Google's money and began slowly sinking the ship while making it look like the orchestra is still playing.

> We can still debate as to why they have been in a death spiral for the last 10 years, and part of it was that they did pretty much everything to avoid making a better browser that could have actually been a competitor to Chrome.

You clearly haven't been paying attention at all. Quantum 57 shipped in 2017 and was a huge investment.

I clearly have. Quantum was the giant middle finger I described in my post.

You're fixating on very necessary changes to the addon ecosystem and selectively ignoring the huge underlying changes to Gecko that were made possible by doing so.