FireFox is not a failing product, it is the only product they have that is not failing and pursuing shiny and new stuff that nobody needs (despite the corpspeak there) is only going to accelerate that towards becoming the truth.

Mozilla is a one-trick pony (well, they were a two trick pony but then they decided to murder Thunderbird and then retracted it or whatever they did, it also confused the hell out of me when they pulled that one). And they now have to accept that, deal with it and focus on being the very best one trick pony they can be.

Sometimes the answer to a company which is trying too many things at random is to drastically reduce the dispersion of effort, and focus ruthlessly.

It's very hard to do psychologically, though.

IMO Mozilla would probably be better served, business-wise, as being "the customizable Chrome". It would be a much smaller business (i.e. less IP under development), but it could be profitable and it leverages their USP in a way that Chrome doesn't seem able or willing to follow.

Finding different products to sell simply leads to Firefox going away, IMO. I don't care about Mozilla; I care about what Firefox does that Chrome does not. And at the end of the day, that's mostly Tree Style Tabs, uBlock and a menu bar.

And the thing with mozilla is that the browser is their core asset. All this other stuff they do? It is fluff, of marginal importance. If they’re not doing the browser, they’re just another small software vendor, irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

WebKit had its beginnings by being borrowed from Konqueror, an open-source and little used web browse for Linux. That really underscores both how it's possible to develop a quality web browser with fewer resources and that having independent technology is useful. Safari wouldn't have been able to leap frog some other browsers if they weren't able to use WebKit to do it. And I think most readers of this site know that it is important that web technology doesn't become a monoculture.

Whether or not Mozilla can secure independent funding without Google, whether they are "viable" or "relevant". I think those questions are a distraction. The real question is, what is Mozilla's mission? Because if they aren't fulfilling the mission, those other factors are irrelevant. And it's clearly possible for them to do something useful in the browser realm even with 0 resources if they had to fall back on community contributions and be a project like Konqueror.

No, I think it presumes that given the Mozilla Foundation's mission, if a browser-focussed Mozilla Corporation is no longer viable, the parent Foundation has utterly failed, and neither it nor the Corporation that supports it has a reason to exist.

Now, one can argue both sides of that, but I think there's a very good argument they the center of the open consumer internet is the browser, and that soloing functionality off of that (even if the particular thing you are promoting happens to be an open solution) ends up just reinforcing the trend toward balkanization of the internet into domains of disconnected functionality mostly ruled by proprietary apps and services.

Firefox bugs that I have personally encountered as a user or developer I want fixed:

- localStorage implementation easily breaks during power failure https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1341070

- SVG rotation glitches

- Fails to correctly render the "Exo 2" font inside an SVG (Granted, for this one, it just made me switch fonts for my application.)

- Spidermonkey, as a JavaScript engine, is slow and the documentation (Perhaps it could be replaced with GraalJavaScript? An engine that lacks basic escape analysis is bad in my book.)

- Various bugs I am assisting them in resolving.

Mozilla while it has a For-Profit Corporation, is still at its core a Non-Profit, they need to keep true to that mission

I think they should just have their own app store for extensions, handle payments and take a good cut.

If Mozilla exists without Firefox it has totally and utterly failed in its one purpose.

An aside from the discussion at hand: is it possible to repackage Gecko so that it uses the same API calls that WebKit uses, basically translating from WebKit calls to Gecko calls? The problem with WebKit and Chromium is that all new browsers are going that direction and Gecko is being left behind. This isn't good for the web as a whole. A version of the Gecko API that could be a drop-in replacement for WebKit would be very helpful here, it seems to me.

Someday they had a name which could be worth something, but I lost my trust in Mozilla ages ago. I don't believe their management, to me they have as much integrity as Facebook (ok, maybe a little more... I'm not sure). I am using Thunderbird and don't know a good alternative, so it would be a pity if it dies, but I'll get over it pretty quickly. Moreover, I don't really need any new features for Thunderbird, nothing but security updates.

Even more than that, I am not really that picky about the engine. Sure, I was always pretty enthusiastic about the technology in Mozilla (I mean — Rust! — do I even need to say more?). And I do like Gecko. But, you know, if they believe they will deliver better if they switch to WebKit, I'm kinda ok with it. If it won't break any plugins, chances are I won't even notice. I may cheer for Servo and stuff, but it's not why I use Firefox. The browser as a product is a bigger part of the UX for me than mere rendering engine. Also, Firefox is still a little less of a spyware than the competition. Fuck up that experience for me, and you lose a very loyal old-time user. Keep up with the competition while not fucking it up, and there's still enough momentum for me not to switch. I guess there's a lot of people like me in that regard.

Finally, Mozilla is not a startup with a core of energetic talented people, who can make miracles happen. It is a quite old non-profit organisation, entrenched with politics. Their biggest (only?) asset I know of is people, who know browser stuff. Well, maybe the brand, known for browser stuff. Do they have anything else at all?

So, yeah, anything is a bet, but I don't think I would bet on anything outside of Firefox. Not now, anyway. When everything is good financially and we have money to spare, well, looking for alternatives may be good. But when you are struggling for money and are about to lose everything you were keeping afloat for the last 20 years... As I said, Mozilla is not known for brilliant top-management, that has a crystal-clear vision and makes ingenious decisions that save the company when the business is struggling. The best thing I would expect them to be able to do is cutting costs, finding new sponsors and new ways to "slightly sell" Firefox without angering too many users. And even that they don't do very well.

The most radical thing I would reasonably expect them to pull of would be to switch all forces to mobile version of Firefox and win it, while loosing desktop version. But I doubt it.

[Also, in some parallel reality they could take advantage of political situation and sell Firefox OS to Huawei (or maybe get a sponsorship). But in this reality, Firefox OS is dead, Mozilla is too rigid to make wild moves like that, and Huawei is waaay more capable of building their own OS than Mozilla.]