Her salary began increasing in the late 2010s, when the annual revenue was already around 500 million. Her salary did not grow in step with revenue, her salary grew after revenue stopped increasing & market share had long been declining. I'm not sure if you're being disingenuous by citing growth since 2005.

> In recent years, the proportion coming from Google has also been coming down (even if slowly, from 90+% to just above 80%), and considerable cash reserves have been built up.

Instead of building cash reserves and laying off engineers, Mozilla could have invested that money in Firefox. Could it have successfully turned around? Maybe not, but we'll never know.

It's basically a question of whether you believe Mozilla's mission is best served by building Firefox or by continuing to exist once Firefox no longer exists, and whether its appropriate then for the foundation chair & CEO to be pulling a 7 figure compensation out of a declining non profit. It's obvious the leadership believes the Mozilla Foundation needs to outlive Firefox, but from my perspective the Mozilla Foundation's influence and significance will be nil without browser marketshare.

2005 is when the Wikipedia table starts. The premise of your "they should have invested in Firefox" is just flawed. They are spending by far the most money on Firefox, always have. And Firefox has always been a perfectly fine browser. They were behind Chrome on some metrics for some years, but have long since caught up. Quantum launched towards the end of 2017, more than 6 years ago.

The idea that the lack of quality of Firefox is the dominant reason behind the declining marketshare just is not plausible to me, and I have seen no evidence posted for it. It's wishful thinking. Firefox and Internet Explorer both started declining when Chrome started eating the world. The speed of the decline does not in any way seem to relate to the gap in tech between the browsers.

They laid off hundreds of staff while they were massively in the black. If your thesis is that Firefox was doomed whatever Mozilla did, and so it's fine to lay off staff and build a warchest to support a post-browser advocacy foundation which pays its leadership 7 figure salaries, that's certainly a position - indeed, it seems to be the position of Mozilla leadership. But to me it is at odds with the thesis of change in which Mozilla keeps the web open by having enough market share to matter in the standards decision making. What is the point of Mozilla without Firefox except to pay the leadership massive salaries?