I’ve switched to Chrome a while ago, but it seems like something may be happening with Mozilla’s finances are they are slowly turning to ads to fund the project. They do promise though that you can turn them off and they emphasize it does not make use of your personal data, but to see Firefox go from a darling in the world of FOSS to what might be an ad-supported product amidst a declining userbase could easily be seen as evidence that the paradigm in many cases is simply destined to fail unless you find a way to crush the software ideology sentiments in your development team.
How ironic that Mozilla rails against Google and the Chrome project when it turns out their ethics aren’t any better, if not worse (like the ethics of the GIMP Foundation vs. the ethics of Adobe). If a FOSS developer rails against a corporation for being ‘evil’ and shows his own foundation to be worse, then his project will ultimately fail and wind up in the graveyard. FOSS can only work if the userbase feels more valued by the respective foundation than they were by the corporation making the product they were using before, but unfortunately we find in many cases, that’s not the case at all.
So is it a sign that Firefox is on its way out as a software, or does it have life in it yet?