They should bring back Brian Eich, things were better for the users when he was in charge.

I don't think it was him in particular, it was just that firing him gave them the opportunity to replace him and his people with people more attuned to their agendas. It's the agendas that should change, the people would follow. They installed a new culture at the top that was more interested in using Firefox as a transitional way to burnish their resumés, and any semblance of core values disappeared in a tangle of projects that were branded as innovation and that everybody could sign. Meanwhile they've been in consistent negative growth in users that is actually starting to look insignificant because their entire userbase is now insignificant. I mean: losing 1%/month of the number of the users they have now seems like a rounding error compared to 1%/month of the users they had 5 years ago.

Anyway, they'll always be guaranteed at least 3% of the market from diehard anti-Google/Microsoft/closed-source users like me, and users from outside the US who are concerned by unaccountable US tech behemoths who are intimately intertwined with the government. With that 3%, they'll be able to fulfill their primary function of being something that Google can claim in an antitrust hearing keeps them from being a monopoly.

>"Things were better before so let's revert to where we were five years ago" is a terrible strategy.

I mean, if things really were better before, reverting to how they were sounds like a pretty good strategy. That's kind of a tautology.

Worked pretty swell for intel when netburst got out of hand and they backtracked. 10 years of market dominance followed.

Intel can't revert the market back 10 years, but the problem with Mozilla isn't its struggles with the market. If it is true that Mozilla's problem is compromised leadership, then it would make perfect sense to go back to independent leadership.

He's running brave now

And Steve Jobs was running NeXT. And like NeXT, Brave doesn't really seem to be catching on...

From what I understand though, Eich has lost faith in Mozilla maintaining their own renderer, so if he came back to Mozilla it would probably coincide with Firefox becoming yet another chromium skin.

Mozilla is sticking with Gecko for now, and they do not need my faith to continue.

Brave is growing, has grown every month, not at over 5.5M MAU. I am not sure how to interpret "Brave doesn't seem to be catching on" as other than false. Firefox in 1H2004 was in a similar trendline. People then still said "IE for evar!"

I have no idea if Brave is going to succeed at their goals, but they are the only ones trying to comprehensively change the model...I wish them success!

Exactly. And they still don't advertise a lot of the Firefox features outside of release notes. I mean REALLY advertise. Google used to have regular commercials with celebrities to advertise Chrome, and people are still somehow baffled that they're number one now? FOSS devs build some good software, but we're terrible at marketing.