> They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox.
Says who? I have never seen figures that show this. It also doesn't excuse the gigantic amounts of money wasted on irrelevant things, or executive salaries.
> And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...
That's pretty charitable. LE was a wider industry initiative, and while Rust was incubated in Mozilla AFAIK, they also let it slip through their fingers.
> Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.
How on earth are you defending her behavior? It was utterly shameless and indefensible. Do you work for Mozilla?
> Mozilla needed and needs to find other products
No, it doesn't. It needs to bank its giant wad of cash and learn to live off the interest plus whatever it can get in donations. Mozilla does not need to be a for-profit company, it needs to be a non-profit making a browser. That was always supposed to be the mission, from day one.
> Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome
They did when IE was shoved down people's throats, and Firefox was the better browser. They did when Chrome came around and started taking over. Most people even now get pushed to Edge or Safari, yet still end up using Chrome. People switching browsers is a thing.
Any other belief or possibility is "utterly shameless and indefensible", and therefore of suspect motivation. Doubt is difficult, but certainty is ridiculous (said someone).