Is it mismanaged? Sure, they spend a fair amount on administration. Sure, they spend about 10% on Mozilla Foundation stuff. But they still spend ~2/3 of revenue on software development.

And they're somewhat stuck between a rock and a hard place.

If they try to evolve their current platform, power users bitch. If they don't evolve their current platform, they lose casual users to ad-promoted alternatives (Chrome and Edge).

And they don't really have the money to do a parallel ground-up rewrite.

The most interesting thing I could see on the horizon is building a user-owned browsing agent (in the AI sense), but then they'd get tarred and feathered for chasing AI.

Part of Mozilla's problem is that the browser is already pretty figured out. After tabs and speed and ad blocking, there weren't any killer features.

Almost nobody chose Chrome. Microsoft had to change how defaults were managed because Chrome kept stealing defaults without even a prompt.

People use "the internet", they don't give a fuck about browsers. Firefox only got as high a usage as it did because of an entire decade of no competition, as Internet Explorer 6 sat still and degraded.

Chrome was installed as malware for tens of millions of people. It used identical processes as similar malware. It's insane to me how far out of their way lots of "Tech" people go to rewrite that actual history. I guess it shouldn't be surprising since about a thousand people here probably helped make those installer bundling deals and wrote the default browser hijacking code.

It should be a crime what Google did with Chrome. They dropped Chrome onto unsuspecting users who never even noticed when malware did the exact same thing with a skinned Chromium a couple days later. Microsoft was taken to court for far less.

How was Mozilla supposed to compete with millions of free advertising Google gave itself and literal default hijacking?