They've made some bad decisions, but it seems that they've managed to right the ship again, with the latest releases of firefox getting rave reviews and some re

They've made some bad decisions, but it seems that they've managed to right the ship again, with the latest releases of firefox getting rave reviews and some really exciting technologies slowly taking shape. Firefox has been widely panned the last few years, but that may have been somewhat harsh, and ungrateful to Mozilla as an organisation. Yes, Chrome has been running laps around them. But that's mostly the result of Google's willingness to outspend them. There are currently two platforms that have/had the potential to significantly harm Google's cash cow of search ads: iOS and Facebook. A lot of the time that was previously spend on the "open web" suddenly moved into these platforms. Sometimes, apps replaced search, such as for purchase decisions, where people started searching in the Amazon app instead of google.com. That made Chrome the single most important technology for Google: they needed to push the browser to be competitive with iOS and whatever Facebook was doing. Playing a game, or streaming movies needed to be as fast, easy-to-use, and safe as doing those things with native apps. Developing for the web needed to be as attractive as developing for native platforms. In that situation, it's no wonder that Firefox lagged behind–the world's best, and richest, software company was developing a browser, with what is likely to be a budget limited only by the diminishing return of ever-larger teams. There's really no guarantee that Google's incentives will forever remain to be aligned with the users' as they are now. To pour all this misguided disappointment on Mozilla and gleefully cheer their demise is foolish, because sooner or later, it will be important again to have an independent, open, OSS browser. It's also somewhat illoyal, considering Mozilla's past accomplishments for the web.