And that's precisely the problem people have been talking about for a decade now. If it was just the browser, maybe it wouldn't have lost 90% of its former market share.
They lost a lot of users because websites were getting heavy and Firefox used to be single-threaded when Chrome appeared and was blazingly fast due to its multi-process design.
I still vividly recall the frozen UI as another tab loaded or did work. And if one tab crashed they all went with it. Annoyed me every time.
After many years[1] they sorted it out, but in my view it's clear that's what really killed their momentum, as it was such a sacrifice to stay with Firefox compared to using Chrome.
Firefox lost market share because they kept antagonizing their users. It's easy to read Chrome as the boogeyman to blame for Firefox' failure, but that's... also not correct.
Mozilla is, rather frustrating for those that lead it I'm sure, chosen largely based on principles that people found they couldn't get from Google. Things like "don't profit from me the user", "don't track me" and "don't do things in my browser without me knowing about it". These aren't things people point towards the Chrome browser with because if you expect any of this to not be done by Google, then you're kidding yourself.
Mozilla meanwhile has a pretty wide history of just... doing things that break this promise[0][1][2] (listed is mostly recent stuff, but they have been doing it since forever, going back to the forced Pocket integration).
Chrome users don't care about this stuff (since they already use a Google product), Firefox users by virtue of picking Firefox did. And when it comes to optimization, Chrome does beat Firefox pretty handily, so people started abandoning Firefox because at that point, both Mozilla and Google offer the same value proposition.
Their recent ventures into adtech are probably going to annihilate their biggest potential userbase gain, which is Google tightening the screws on adblockers and uBlock Origin in particular not playing ball with them on it. (UBOL is a joke and the UI by design makes it look like a "kiddie"/unprofessional adblocker.)
Google didn't kill Firefox (they want it alive to avoid antitrust lawsuits). Mozilla did.
Normal users like my parents were completely unaware of all of these shenanigans. They do notice sites and their OS's nagging them to use Chrome/Edge/Safari.
Or we need effective antitrust regulation. Firefox would be in a very different position if Google hadn’t been allowed to make the YouTube experience worse for Firefox users (promises around WebM, proprietary web components) along with the heavy marketing push.
Word of mouth worked fine in Firefox’s favor for a few years.
I switched to Chrome years ago because it ran so much smoother than Firefox, and anecdotally I know of many others who did the same. With the switch, so did the recommendations.
This was before website's and OS's were consistently nagging people to switch to their own browser. And when the everyday browsing experience varied more among different browsers.
And now things are kind of going full circle, because part of the reason why Mozilla/Firefox increased their scope was to create services that would capture marketshare from a specific audience; which seems to be those who care about their privacy, though executive pay isn’t apart of that, and I don’t know if theres a viable defense for that.
Just to provide one example, if Firefox suddenly no longer has bookmark/history/password syncing because Mozilla has refocused on its core products (Firefox/Thunderbird/MDN), suddenly you'll see Firefox's market share dwindle even more, because ordinary users are accustomed to every browser having a bunch of bells and whistles like profile syncing.
The set of features people expect from a modern browser is really big now. To their credit, the Mozilla web standards people actively fought against a lot of the scope creep like "webpages should be able to flash firmware to USB devices" or "webpages should be able to talk to MIDI keyboards" but they lost, and now those are things a web browser is expected to do.
I've seen people argue that Mozilla shouldn't be offering cloud services and should just build a browser that never phones home to any servers at all, whether it's telemetry, automated updates, or profiles. I think all of those are part of shipping a modern browser, personally.
Maintaining all those cloud services raises your company's operational costs a lot, you now need people on-call 24/7 to maintain everything, you need webdevs who can wrangle postgres or redis or whatever, you need security experts to make sure the cloud stack is secure end to end, etc. So I think it's also fair for people to call this cloud stuff out as a cost center for Mozilla.
Which cloud services? I don't see how automated updates nor sync count as "cloud services" (and I'll note that the sync server used to be open source, so you could pull from the community like Mozilla claims to be part of).
A very large portion of the money goes directly into the pockets of senior managers who, based on Mozilla's dismal and falling market share, add absolutely no value to the business.
More than 1% of revenue (not profit; revenue) goes straight into the pocket of the CEO.
