Well, it's slower for one and web features lag for two. But the one that is really the most important to me is security and privacy features. Browsers have effectively made two majors improvements recently - Safari made third party tracking impossible by gradually fully segmenting everything - HTTP caches, LocalStorage, cookies, etc. - and Chrome made JIT exploitation and then Spectre attacks in JavaScript impossible by using process boundary separations and applying sandboxes to purpose built processes. On both fronts, Firefox is behind. Chrome devs are also engaged in active anti-fingerprinting efforts from minor efforts (like reducing the fingerprint-ability in Safari's new APIs, reducing the amount of available by default information in the user agent, or defining SameSite cookies).

I also see privacy issues sit in the Firefox bugtracker. I read about fuzz tests from project zero and elsewhere and realize Firefox is under-fuzzed, both DOM and JS. I finally stopped using Firefox because, as somebody who writes native code for a living and reads about bytecode VMs for fun in my spare time, I could no longer convince myself that it was satisfactorily secure.

What awesome technical choices do you think Mozilla has made recently? I'd love to hear an example. Throwing away the plug-in model to catch up for performance was an necessary technical choice (perhaps), but it was largely solving a self-made problem and catching up with the competition rather than bona fide innovation, so it falls short of "awesome" to me.

There have been epic things, indeed. But also bad ones:

- many addons are still broken/unsupported after Quantum

- addons have been blocked from Firefox for questionab,e reasons

- Firefox often ships proprietary third party software & DRM

- telemtry enabled by default

- the total fiasco that is the totally incomplere Fenix that was released to the stable channel on Android

There have been epic things, but the list of bad things has been growing a lot.

> It is notable that in your summary you refer to this as political fashion swings, and "unpopular" political views, and an overreaction. Would you characterize the civil right movement in the same fashion?

Just to answer your question explicitly: yes. If somebody had a political opinion that was popular with 40% of the population and had not brought it into the workplace, I would not support firing the person for holding that opinion, even if the opinion were, for example, that schools should be segregated by race. While I personally don't support segregation by race, I don't find firing people for political views kept outside of work to be in the long term interest of liberal societies. I find the notion of segregated but equal schools unworkable (because those with power will always ensure their schools are better) but not inherently evil. And, in some situations (e.g. gender), I do not oppose "separate but equal" schooling. While I personally attended a public school, I have several friends who attended single-sex private schools, and they turned out OK.

With all this in mind, your language around "denying a human right" makes it clear that you aren't giving Eich's views a fair hearing. California had domestic partnerships for same sex couples that ensured comparable protections around spousal visitation, etc. While I also disagree with the notion of "separate but equal" for partnerships and support granting gay couples the right to marriage, international organizations (like the United Nations) do not generally consider "separate but equal" to be human rights violations. To be a human rights violation, the separation must be coupled with a disparity in treatment (as in segregated schooling in the United States), which Eich is explicitly opposed to.

Brendan Eich donated to a proposal opposed to same sex marriage during a year that Barack Obama was opposed to same sex marriage. Do you believe that Barack Obama's opposition to same sex marriage should have made him unsuitable for any executive employment (i.e. in the private sector as a CEO, or in the public sector as a Mayor, Governor, or POTUS)?

At companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, you can work on a browser regardless of your political views. At Mozilla, you need to think a certain way first. A smaller pool of technical talent to choose from leads to worse technical leadership. Recall that Eich only became the CEO (over the opposition of a portion of the board) after months where Mozilla was searching and couldn't find anybody better. It's not that the people who have particular political views are particularly talented, it's just that some of them are talented, just like the people who disagree with them. If you can include talented people of all stripes, you can do better than if you restrict yourself to talented people from a single ideological group.

> So he supported denying a human right to a group of people

Marriage is certainly part of UDHR ("according to national laws governing the exercise of this right" which allows said human right to not apply to certain groups of people. UDHR also considers it a human right for someone to be kidnapped and forcefully re-educated so I do not understand why anyone takes it seriously) but that does not make it a human right. Marriage is nothing more than the government acknowledging that two people love each other, I personally fail to see why this should be a human right (or why the government is meddling in it at all).