Lost marketshare isn't a criticism. It's an indication that every minute of the day, more current firefox are annoyed and leave than non-firefox users are attracted to install.
CEO pay also isn't a criticism of the browser, its an indication that the organization either rewards failure, or sees its current situation as success. Either way, it doesn't bode well for the future.
Lost marketshare is an observation. We can speculate all day.
Did Firefox lose marketshare because of:
Google intentionally making their sites worse in Firefox?
The lack of multiprocess for so long?
No support for Google Earth until 2020?
Google shipping a polyfill that made YouTube.com 3x slower in Firefox and Safari for years?
The move to WebExtensions happening too late, resulting in burnout and lost interest from the extension community because they had already ported their extensions to e10s?
Slack going out of their way to use a non-standard SDP format thats only supported in Chrome, resulting in no other browsing supporting video calls?
Microsoft Teams also does the same thing.
Mobile overtaking desktop, where Chrome reigns supreme as a platform default?
I don't think it's such a big contributor, but there are also regular and dedicated Brave shills in many tech communities which traditionally favored Firefox (not necessarily funded by Brave directly, they may be independently incentivized from holding the crypto token BAT).
Or they are just former Firefox users who went where the previous CEO from Firefox went, after he got kicked out from Mozilla for non-technical reasons in 2014.
Because it seems whatever technical “vision” Mozilla used to have back then have more or less vanished, while Brave seems to have quite a bit of it.
Edit: Back in the days I loved Firefox because it was made by the Mozilla foundation, which stood for things I found important, which I trusted and “loved”.
Today Firefox is still made by the Mozilla foundation, but that entity has little in common with the Mozilla of old besides the name.
In that regard holding on to Firefox “because Mozilla” is IMO largely holding on to a delusion or a lie.
I was myself in denial over this for a long period of time before I realized that my “love” for Firefox was no longer real. I was just using it out of a misplaced sense of obligation, not because it genuinely made me excited, like it used to back in the days.
Mozilla failed in its mission. Let’s hope someone else can find their place.
CEO pay also isn't a criticism of the browser, its an indication that the organization either rewards failure, or sees its current situation as success. Either way, it doesn't bode well for the future.