I'm sadly almost in this camp. Firefox is incredibly important to me and is critical for the open web to survive.

Mozilla has proven to be really bad stewards, and as long as they exist nobody is going to pick up firefox. They've had many years to wake and up correct the course but choose not to, so it may be time to die. If Mozilla disappeared, a new organization could pick it up and run with it. If it weren't so overloaded in tech already, I might even call it "Phoenix" as it arose from the ashes of Firefox.

Since implementing EME, I'm not sure Firefox is critical for an open web, since by almost definition, EME isn't open. As a practical matter I can understand why they chose to implement it (though that was not without controversy), but let's not fool ourselves here.

that's an interesting point to consider. I wonder what would have happened had they not done it? Would it have accelerated the decline? Or would it have been enough to get services not to use DRM? I'm not sure, but I think FF may have just dropped to irrelevancy faster had they not done it.

I doubt this. Maintaining and developing a competitive browser is serious work, and needs skilled professionals working on it full time, as well as getting stuck in to the web standards process. That requires a level of funding that most community projects only dream of. I can't see any incentive for industry to put money behind it in the way that they do with Linux.

I have very few complaints about Firefox as software. I only wish more people would use it. (That includes you, dear reader!) It is actually great, and if you've ever complained about AMP, WEI or anything like that, using a non-Google derived browser is one of the few things you can actually do to reduce Google's power here.

Firefox are up against the power of OS defaults and dirty tricks in an age where most people don't really know what a web browser is. But if you have any awareness or concern about the health of the open web, you are absolutely educated enough to use Firefox. Of course there will be the odd minor workflow thing to get used to. But Firefox is great. All you really need is the motivation to choose something other than the default.

You could fork it