Graphs like these have been going on for years.

It is possible that the CEO came in and cleaned out the bloat of workers that just come in and hang out basically (common in the tech field and has been done to Twitter (X)). -That would make the salary increase correlate to savings. Showing a correlation between development and available funds would be pertinent. Just off the top of my head, I remember significant improvements since first seeing graphs like this.

Also take into account the competition was dismal until Chrome came along. Much like the game console market when Sony entered it, the browser market was hurting with a hole to fill for a strong leader.

Mozillas politics don’t help. Choosing a side can alienate about half your user base. Flip-flopping sides and you’re killing off your whole user base. Declaring dishonestly that ‘we can’t do this without your donations’ while making bank from Google (long time ago) doesn’t help either. Politics would need to come into play here and how much those are on the CEO.

They mostly appeal to Linux users (people more likely to switch out things), and almost every Linux YouTuber promotes Brave (which is shady af). Brave also has or had an undeniable corporate presence in the browsers sub on Reddit with weekly Brave vs *** for a particular category Brave would win at by low karma accounts. Firefox lacked that marketing, not for being a bad browser. Prior to, they had the FOSS fanbase influencing for them.

Statistics and graphs are tools of propagandists. There might be something there, but there’s often a bigger picture to be seen. Firefox isn’t a bad browser, and I’m hoping they can turn it around to gain marketshare again. (and drop all politics).