When Mozilla announced Firefox OS, some management factions pushed to cut Firefox to a skeleton crew and go "all in" on Firefox OS. Even though Firefox still had 30% market share and Chrome only 20%, they were ready to give up the desktop. Thankfully that didn't happen because others knew Firefox "kept the lights on." Imagine a Mozilla without Firefox OS, where the hundreds of engineer-years and hundreds of millions of dollars poured into Firefox OS had instead been invested in Servo and e10s/multiprocess Firefox..
And Brave makes me sad. No disrespect to Brendan and his team! Kudos to them for building an opinionated product that excites people. But many of Brave's praised features are things Mozilla considered but dropped due to fear of publisher retaliation or lack of focus. Things like:
* Tracking protection in non-private browsing mode
* Blocking third-party cookies from unvisited domains
* HTTPS Everywhere integration
* Partitioned user sessions
* Promoting alternatives to toxic web advertising
* Some sort of micropayment system
* One-click Tor or secure VPN browsing
[Disclaimer: I am a Mozilla employee, but these are my own opinions.]
And Brave makes me sad. No disrespect to Brendan and his team! Kudos to them for building an opinionated product that excites people. But many of Brave's praised features are things Mozilla considered but dropped due to fear of publisher retaliation or lack of focus. Things like:
[Disclaimer: I am a Mozilla employee, but these are my own opinions.]