> Firefox OS: 2013

Apple wouldn't let Firefox onto the iPhone. Pretty big writing on the wall, there. Turns out it's really hard for a sub-billion-dollar company to succeed with a mobile OS, though, which is why we only really have two left. (Even Microsoft couldn't swing it)

> Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014

Shipping the only major browser that can't play movies, cool cool cool.

> Directory Tiles: 2014

Nearly everything on the web visited with Firefox is funded by advertising. The new tab page is one of the least obtrusive surfaces in the browser that still gets seen. Seemed worth a shot to try building an ad stack in that space which tried not to surveil.

> Pocket acquisition: 2015

Discovery on the web is hard. Maybe that's a job for a browser? Maybe folks will pay for it? Maybe it can pay folks on the web?

> Firefox Focus: 2015

Privacy seems like a good idea. Maybe folks would like a browser that focuses on that?

> Cliqz experiment: 2017

That's Brave Search, these days. Lots of folks seem to like it?

> "Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017

I don't know the whole story there. IMO, looked to me like some earnest folks tried to do something fun but rolled a 1 on the d20 for a critical fail. Footguns abound.

Not saying all the above were handled with perfection, but I was there for all of them and there were good folks doing things that made sense at the time. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess?

I agree that I don't think there was anything wrong with Firefox Focus, and the hostile reaction to the Mr. Robot thing I find completely inexplicable. It didn't involve telemetry, sinister industry collaboration, compromise performance, or implicate Mozilla as a bad industry actor in any meaningful way. It all hinges on buying into a very idiosyncratic attempt at moral equivalence to egregious breaches of trust that never really made sense to me.

Of the list, I would grant that Firefox OS has a credible case for siphoning non-trivial resources away from the browser at a time that coincided with their period of market share loss.

The others I don't love, because again I could compare this to what I consider the peak of Opera before it went to Chromium, I considered it to push truly mind-blowing user beneficial innovation (Opera Unite was truly mind blowing to me, and I fully buy the hype about its revolutionary potential, though I suspect in our present environment, perhaps an unsustainable security nightmare).

So clearly there are ways to do it better, and I accept them as falling outside the 2020 to 2025 window. But their invocation on behalf of a tragic narrative of Mozilla misjudgment strikes me more as containing a pound of irresponsible rhetorical excess for every ounce of truth. Though I'm heartened that it seems the tide has turned against this narrative on HN.