"Forgotten" is too generous. That's like chalking up a corrupt government to "incompetence."
They sold out. The sooner we recognize them as a permanently corrupt entity, the better we will be.
The Ladybird browser and similar efforts are the only hope at this point.
But, among the tiny contingent that has stuck around, most of us are here for the privacy I think.
I don't think I would agree that they ever actually 'survived' Chrome at all. Mozilla had market share because it was the best thing before Chrome, in largely a pre-mobile era (at least in terms of pools of users that determined who led browser market share.) The focus on privacy was sourced from an ethos that has long existed in the software development community as a kind of baked-in default that I think was broadly shared by a lot of people and depressingly now is regarded as a kind of unique personality twist that the occasional company has.
The onset of Chrome I don't think involved survival, but was instead a steady march toward Chrome gaining dominant market share.
Mozilla survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly and almost totally dependent on Google --- one of (if not "the") world's biggest privacy invaders.
And I seriously doubt they have forgotten where almost all their money comes from.
I mean, just look at their business model. Enshittification or bankruptcy was always the future.
Don't really disagree otherwise though.
I hide most of the UI in either browser so your concern just doesn't make much sense to me.
We assume Mozilla is now just another ad-pandering jackwagon because that is the only safe assumption when presented with the facts: a major change in management, followed by removal of "we won't sell your data" across all of their marketing.
Their userbase is arguably mostly people who put up with browser disparity for the sake of peace of mind about their data. That type of user will abandon Firefox the same way we did Chrome.