*facepalm*

Please, don't exaggerate. ActiveX had never been popular, it was used mostly for specialized applications like bank clients or internal systems.

And Mozilla (not Firefox!) had ActiveX support at that time, as a module: http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm

We did have to implement some IE compatibility things to avoid breaking too many sites. We avoided ActiveX in the core, although there was a plugin. We had to do document.all (in a clever undetectable way), marquee, and perhaps some others.

Mozilla and Firefox still allowed you to run non-Free plugins such as Flash, or Java which is maybe a better analogy. They've worked hard to try and get people away from Flash by helping extend open web technologies to cover the most common use cases.

> It was technical excellence, innovative usability features and good security.

Indeed, but it seems Mozilla lost confidence in their product and in their abilities to keep above the competition, to make a prodcut that users would want to use for its strengths.

But I think they still have it in them to eventuell start competing again, just like Internet Explorer got turned around.

In the IE6 era Firefox started gaining market share rapidly. We gained market share because we had a few good features IE didn't have --- particularly tabs and popup blocking ... and the hiatus in IE development gave us free reign in the market. If we'd stayed stuck at 0 market share we would have had zero impact on Web developers or anything else.

Not implementing ActiveX was a good decision. It didn't much inhibit our market share (and hence influence in other areas), but it probably did discourage Web devs from deploying ActiveX outside intranets. We're doing similar things today, e.g. by refusing to implement PNaCl/Pepper and other non-standard features.

The situation with DRM is totally different. There aren't simple rules that always work; each situation has to be analyzed on its own.

It was not particularly quick. It may seem so, because in order to get as good a deal as we've managed from a CDM vendor, we had to be prepared to walk away if the deal wasn't good enough (and I believe we were). And discussing our exact strategy in public would have blown up most of that negotiating leverage.

> There's plenty of history to suggest Mozilla is quite capable of saying no to implementing an anti-feature like EME, or at the very least, organising to make it painful for the bad guys to actually use. But in reality the exact opposite is happening

It is likely that this case is different because there are a lot of wealthy companies that gain a lot through that change and are almost certainly be generous in their rewards.

Adobe, for example, would have no selling point left for their DRM system now that Flash is on the way out. This deal allows them to keep that part of their business alive.

Which will very likely result in a second corporate sponsor for Mozilla (additional to Google), so it is a win-win situation for the two companies.

> Here's one example — it's a WebRTC interoperability bug (which I got
> bitten by recently while searching for open Skype alternatives), marked
> wontfix with some harsh developer responses.

What you're seeing in that WebRTC bug is someone attempting to rehash an argument they already lost in the rtcweb WG at the IETF (see comments 7 and 9). Our developers were understandably not amused.

This is a classic example of Mozilla pushing for real standards built through an open process instead of "whatever browser X happens to ship". In other words, exactly the kind of good we're able to do because we have market share.

I'm not going to touch the image format debate, because people tend not to respond rationally, but I will say that it is obviously impossible to give everyone what they want all the time. Citing two examples where we have not given someone exactly what they wanted does not imply that there is not some imperative to build a product that people actually want to use in order to have some kind of influence.

Everyone I have switched to Firefox over the past decade has had a backup browser that they use for one or two 'special' websites that they must use for some reason but refuse to, well, be websites. Even the most nontechnical can get the concept of 'one browser good, safe to use, other browser very insecure, must use for task x and y but avoid otherwise.' This was never a threat to firefox market share, quite the opposite, it helped regular people become and stay aware of the challenges the free and open web faces.

I have never known anyone to switch away from firefox because a specific site didnt want to work with it no matter how important the site. I have known dozens to switch after I gave up and quit fixing the cascading UI breakage caused by updating it, however.