> Firefox is a consumer product, unlike BSD. I know this is disagreeable on this forum, but RMS' values although certainly commendable are not super useful in building popular consumer products. As evidenced by absolutely negligible proportion of consumer software created with values as uncompromising as RMS (measured by the number of users who actually choose the software, not people who use it without knowing, because that has nothing to do with consumer products or values).

Have you ever heard of Krita (GPL3)? VLC (GPL2)? Inkscape (GPL)? They are far from being negligible and they have a huge consumer following across the world. So I find the claim that Free Software principles are not super useful to build successful consumer products largely false. And such software is actually chosen by end users for the examples I provided (and there's more), because of their intrinsic qualities.

I really don't think Chrome has a better product because of the outspending for technical work . Firefox post quantum is on par and in some features actually better browser than Chrome.

If it all took was money to spend build , Microsoft would still be doing building Edge , they have deep enough pockets and it was technically really good product, scored most in standards compliance etc.

Google makes sure it apps work very well with Chrome, apps that is used by a lot of people daily. Youtube on Firefox is/was a good example of this bias. When most of the time you spend on the web is on google sites, if they don't perform well on Firefox you will switch to Chrome.

Google uses its dominating market share in Chrome to implement features way before it becomes standard or is agreed, this forces web developers to adopt these non standard features to compete in the market. AMP is typical example of this kind of abuse. You don't really have a choice but to make your site work very well which google products and Chrome.

Firefox and other players are forced to redo their work. A recent example of this is Edge redoing their ORTC implementation to kind WebRTC implemented in Firefox/Chrome, ORTC was a simpler better implementation but Edge had no choice to switch directions for compat reasons) or they have play catch up to Chrome, it is always moving target. This kind of market abuse is not new, Microsoft did it when IE was at its peak, it is way to keep your dominating market share by ensuring competition keeps following you not lead you.

Firefox is always going to lag in some areas unless they can get large enough market share to pull their own way like before. They need to find areas where they can shine, real privacy and trust is one reason for the 9% share they still have, Servo/rust was a route to really out perform the bloat Chrome is today and truly leverage multi-threaded concurrent performance . MDN was great way to build brand with developers who can make sure their apps work in their browser. These were couple of the projects killed.

GNU utils are building blocks for so many commonly used products today. GNU and GPL found support where it mattered with developers. OS X or Chrome OS or Android or iOS or of course Linux directly runn code written in GNU projects many times code written in 80's by Stallman.

Firefox should be focusing on being developer friendly, projects like positron the electron competitor should have been funded and invested far more and led the way. Had firefox developed a better electron than electron perhaps they would be gaining new kinds of market from having saying Slack developed on top it instead of chrome based electron.

There are people who use Firefox on mobile because it is the only browser to support ad-blocking on mobile , building a unique value proposition and carving a large enough user base for that usecase will allow them to survive.