But over the years they’ve spent money on an email client basically no one uses, trying to make a social network, trying to make a phone operating system, and who knows what else. Just huge amounts of money going to what often looks like a complete fools errand. I understand Thunderbird but a phone OS?

Money that could’ve gone to either make Firefox better or to advertise/promote it.

If FF was doing great in the market and they had millions of spare dollars, pursuing other things that match their goals would make sense. But that really doesn’t seem like where they are.

Instead it feels a lot more like if private equity bought an open source project.