Well, back in the day the FF devs said "no" to background-position-x and y in CSS (when we didn't had HTTP 2 and we used CSS sprites as a way to load websites faster by decreasing the number of connections).

My reaction was to "sabotage" FF users by prioritizing IE and Chrome and not actively testing my websites in FF, but only waiting until users reported bugs.

My thinking back in the day was: Why would I write N times more lines of code for a browser that had way less market share than Internet Explorer, especially when Chrome was faster and worked better?

By the time Firefox corrected course and prioritized parity with other browsers (ie. the -webkit fiasco), their market share was already an order of magnitude smaller.

15 years later, I don't feel proud of my actions, but my own conclusion is that every individual action added up. Now I feel sad to see Firefox with less than 3% market share because the damage is irreparable now.

Those are massively different scenarios. Off the top of my head:

- Mozilla doesn't derive its revenue directly from users. - Mozilla is/was competing with a corporation with vastly more resources on every level. More engineering resources, ability to leverage other parts of its business to promote/favor Chrome, and fairly direct financial control over Mozilla. - Mozilla's wrong moves aren't related to asking people to pay - they have at various times alienated or disappointed developers and end users.

Also worth noting that Firefox has artificially been blocked from competing on iOS (as has Chrome, but Google has its own mobile OS...) - so that's been a factor in their declining share that has little to nothing to do with their "neglecting" anybody.

There is value in advocates, but I'll say again: it tends to be overstated. And I hardly ever see self-professed enthusiastic users actually arguing for price increases / changes to support the development that generates the products.

It would be so refreshing to see self-professed enthusiastic users actually lobbying for people to pay for what they use instead of constantly tearing down companies trying to stay afloat.

I know the subscription model is a problem for end users as it spreads to more and more apps and services. The lifetime license model is a problem for the vendors. Especially for something like macOS where Apple releases a new OS every year. Right now shops that support macOS have to support like three macOS releases + two hardware architectures + the upcoming macOS.

Just how many users can an "enthusiastic user" convert to paid to make it worthwhile, if it ties the company's hands in terms of changing its revenue model as the world changes? Especially when that user is actively advocating against revenue?

It’s a tricky one. I feel like enthusiastic users’ recommendations (browser tabs!!) is what grew Firefox in the first place, but also what killed its market share as users became enthusiastic about Chrome instead (fast! crashes limited to one tab only!!).

These days, Firefox just isn’t better than it’s competition in ways that large numbers of people care about, alas. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any big cohort of users enthusiastic about any browser in particular right now. I doubt Mozilla can fix that easily. I think it’ll take the next revolution in browser tech (whatever that is).