Their marketing problem is, in my interpretation, based around the flawed mindset that you should treat users as non-technical cattle. This is the chrome way. T

Their marketing problem is, in my interpretation, based around the flawed mindset that you should treat users as non-technical cattle. This is the chrome way. The problem is, Mozilla has historically thrived off of the opposite - the 'hacker' mentality. The only reason Mozilla even exists is due primarily to Jamie Zawinski! I agree with your point about the shift in major version releases — this was another marketing ploy to 'catch up' to Chrome (who, for whatever reason, popularized the ridiculous practice of tagging releases with huge numbers). When it comes to add-ons, this bigger-is-better mindset/fallacy is one of the things that Mozilla touts about the ~2000 new web-extensions on AMO. What they fail to mention is how many of these are just utterly useless (or whose core functionality is bested by something like youtube-dl, mpv, using the dev tools, etc.). People don't want the highly limited feature-set provided by web-extensions, they want add-ons that integrate themselves deep into the browser internals (noscript), leverage the add-on sdk, or modify the browser chrome:// in some way. Edit: I cannot speak about the FOSS community as a whole (I only have experience in academia/government work), but from what I have read online about Mozilla's internal leadership, it currently seems like a difficult place to work if you legitimately care about these kinds of issues. As for Palemoon, (I have made this clear in previous posts on HN and reddit), but I generally consider that project to be less than a joke. It would take an absolutely herculean amount of time and energy to keep their feature-set even with Firefox while retaining all of the stuff that is being decimated from mozilla-central. It's never going to work. They should focus their attention on SeaMonkey (comm-central) instead of wasting their time.