Not trying to armchair quarterback here, just speculating for entertainment
> Around this time, Mozilla started paying serious attention to Chrome. Chrome had started with very different design guidelines than Firefox:
> * at the time, Chrome didn’t care about eating too much memory or system resources;
> * Chrome used many processes, which gave this browser heightened security and responsiveness by design;
> * Chrome had started without an add-on API, which meant that Chrome developers could get away with refactoring anything they wanted, without this development tax;
as Chrome introduced their extension mechanism, they did it with a proper API, which could usually be maintained regardless of changes to the back-end;
Was it possible to do this inside Mozilla? Release a new browser with different branding that does not have these handicaps. Then, let the marketplace decide which browser to pick. If it won out, announce publicly that ongoing investment would be on the new browser.
There were discussions within Mozilla regarding whether this would be a good idea. Over the years, we released several smaller browsers for Android (Firefox Focus, Firefox Rocket). We rewrote a browser basically from scratch for FirefoxOS (which is now used in KaiOS, I believe).
I believe that if any of these browsers were ever to become big successes, a case could be made. For the moment, it doesn't look like this is happening.
I'd argue that the Firefox's implementation of the WebExtension standard (inspired by Chrome) has turned out to actually have the better API with Promises and a vendor neutral prefix.
That said, you're right that the independent competition made everyone better. Sadly with Chromium becoming the defacto web spec we won't get as much innovation.
This sounds like a pretty bad financial and strategic plan. So you suggest that Mozilla should have concurrently developed two browser engines, doubling the cost of its engineering while also competing with itself?
Servo was always a research project, and not a full browser replacement intended to compete with Firefox. As the article states, many components of Servo eventually ended up in Firefox.
> Around this time, Mozilla started paying serious attention to Chrome. Chrome had started with very different design guidelines than Firefox:
> * at the time, Chrome didn’t care about eating too much memory or system resources;
> * Chrome used many processes, which gave this browser heightened security and responsiveness by design;
> * Chrome had started without an add-on API, which meant that Chrome developers could get away with refactoring anything they wanted, without this development tax; as Chrome introduced their extension mechanism, they did it with a proper API, which could usually be maintained regardless of changes to the back-end;
Was it possible to do this inside Mozilla? Release a new browser with different branding that does not have these handicaps. Then, let the marketplace decide which browser to pick. If it won out, announce publicly that ongoing investment would be on the new browser.