That chart shows a pretty beautiful 10 year trend. Yep, they are on a sinking ship.
'Failures' on the other hand - that is a loaded word. They are failures, they have failed at making Firefox popular. But what needed to happen to build an alternative world where they succeeded? The browsers that succeeded were Chrome and Safari - browsers sponsored by the owners of the two major platforms for accessing the internet, backed by billions of dollars of corporatyness.
What is Firefox meant to do? Charities aren't innovation engines. Back in the day when they were making progress on market share, the options were Firefox or IE6. The strategy of the Chrome web team is slightly different than the IE6 web team. I'm sour about Firefox wiping out their value proposition when they canned the good extensions - but that happened circa 2017 so it isn't the problem for adoption. They need something radical to be relevant and that isn't a fair ask of a nonprofit.
Operating systems are basically a commodity. Browsers? Doubly so. I don't care who's in charge of Mozilla - if your "product" is your browser, you better hope your "customers" feel charitable. "If everyone donated $2.99.." and etc.
Maybe you just can't run a successful business in the browser space in 2020. It was already plenty difficult in the mid-90's, wasn't it?
No, they succeeded at making it impopular. FireFox was popular they had a shot at cementing market dominance. The were more popular than Chrome and MS's product combined.
But now they are a fringe browser, that already has problems keeping up with the developments on the web.
Note that for Google they are only a fig-leaf in their upcoming anti-trust case. Note that Google pulled a lot of underhanded tricks to get people to switch to Chrome and paying FF may have been just enough to keep Mozilla quiet about this. If it had been a for-profit situation and with a different source of revenues for Mozilla then there is a fair chance Mozilla would have made a case for anti-competitive behavior by Google.
So that money may have acted to Google's benefit in more than just one way.
The unique selling point of Firefox (and especially: mobile Firefox) was ability to heavily customize it and use third party extensions.
Those extensions were the ones bringing in the innovation -> most ideas came from third parties (on a side note: usually for free, since extensions are hard to monetize).
The system just worked and gave many popular extensions like Tab Mix Plus, Ad-Block, Noscript... through basic customization extensions like Classic Theme Restorer (have you ever setup new browser for a grandmother who does not need 50 options everywhere when you right click? can you even do this now in new Firefox? or the new extension model does not allow it) through countless small extensions that changed users' workflows how they wanted. This ecosystem is all gone.
Developers inside of Firefox completely ignored it - they killed the old extension system because they didn't like it, while they did not provide anything that is even 25% as good. I understand that creating a new, better system is hard, but that is their job and core product. Firefox could have been providing the framework on which extensions would sit.
Also, they earned 500 million dollars per year, for years; had over 1000 employees. They couldnt find people who could solve hard problems?
Or maybe it is a failure of project management: developers ignored hard problems, they preferred to work on new, shiny green-field projects. Those new toys are great: they boost the CV, allow to play with new technologies, often are left in half baked state so you dont care about bugs. They also have no users, so nobody will complain, basically no accountability for a project that is never finished and killed after 1-2 years.
We saw many of such side projects in Firefox - all shifting away resources from the core product that is neglected.
Firefox’s decline was already well in progress before anything changed with extensions. The problem was that Google’s ad profits allowed them to pour money into Chrome without needing the browser to be profitable, and their advertisements of Chrome on the most popular websites were hard to counter. Extensions weren’t moving the needle on that and, as many people involved have explained, the old design was a substantial maintenance cost preventing other important changes to remain competitive with Chrome.
The big question is whether there’s a model for browser development which isn’t subsidized by huge companies which profit elsewhere. Short of government support (antitrust, direct funding, etc.) I’m not sure there is a viable path forward.
'Failures' on the other hand - that is a loaded word. They are failures, they have failed at making Firefox popular. But what needed to happen to build an alternative world where they succeeded? The browsers that succeeded were Chrome and Safari - browsers sponsored by the owners of the two major platforms for accessing the internet, backed by billions of dollars of corporatyness.
What is Firefox meant to do? Charities aren't innovation engines. Back in the day when they were making progress on market share, the options were Firefox or IE6. The strategy of the Chrome web team is slightly different than the IE6 web team. I'm sour about Firefox wiping out their value proposition when they canned the good extensions - but that happened circa 2017 so it isn't the problem for adoption. They need something radical to be relevant and that isn't a fair ask of a nonprofit.