It seems like a lot of people would have liked to see Mozilla double-down on Firefox to the exclusion of all else.
Personally I would have leaned towards the opposite approach to meet their stated mission of ensuring an open internet. Historically, Firefox has been the means by which Mozilla earned a seat at the table, but I would have liked to see them diversify their portfolio a bit rather than relying entirely on a single browser. If I had been in charge, I would:
Focus on developing Rust, Servo/Gecko, SpiderMonkey. Keep projects like Firefox and Thunderbird as reference implementations but encourage Microsoft, Brave, Opera, and open-source forks to build their own products based on Mozilla technologies. Assemble a broad coalition of companies that base their web browsers, email clients, feature phones, smart TVs, consoles, etc on Mozilla technologies. Explore using licensing and corporate memberships to offset decreases in advertising revenue. The end-goal being to ensure that Mozilla-based browsers capture enough of the market that they have a seat at the table with Apple and Google and then use that leverage to push for web standards that are beneficial to end-users.
Of course, that ship has sailed now that Safari and Firefox are the only browsers with a non-negligible market-share that are not built on top of chromium. Given Firefox's trajectory, Apple is realistically the only player left who can prevent Google from dictating the direction of the web. If Apple decides to throw in the towel or let Google drive, webpages essentially become Chrome-pages.
Personally I would have leaned towards the opposite approach to meet their stated mission of ensuring an open internet. Historically, Firefox has been the means by which Mozilla earned a seat at the table, but I would have liked to see them diversify their portfolio a bit rather than relying entirely on a single browser. If I had been in charge, I would:
Focus on developing Rust, Servo/Gecko, SpiderMonkey. Keep projects like Firefox and Thunderbird as reference implementations but encourage Microsoft, Brave, Opera, and open-source forks to build their own products based on Mozilla technologies. Assemble a broad coalition of companies that base their web browsers, email clients, feature phones, smart TVs, consoles, etc on Mozilla technologies. Explore using licensing and corporate memberships to offset decreases in advertising revenue. The end-goal being to ensure that Mozilla-based browsers capture enough of the market that they have a seat at the table with Apple and Google and then use that leverage to push for web standards that are beneficial to end-users.
Of course, that ship has sailed now that Safari and Firefox are the only browsers with a non-negligible market-share that are not built on top of chromium. Given Firefox's trajectory, Apple is realistically the only player left who can prevent Google from dictating the direction of the web. If Apple decides to throw in the towel or let Google drive, webpages essentially become Chrome-pages.