I dont think I understood the point about mozilla wanting to influence the web being bad for firefox.
Particlulalry if having lots of users is how you influence things, since then you need to provide a good product (or lock users in via some external ecosystem).
Maybe some recent EU legislation moves can help them in the same way the browser choice thing helped.
Well thats the thing... Firefox is not particularly good in anything and this is the point of the article. When Firefox becomes more unpopular than Mozilla fails its mission aside from Firefox, which is to set open web standards.
The situation for Firefox is that bad, that even enterprise users - ESR - are moving to MS Edge since its offering support together with MS Office.
I think Firefox needs something drastic to become relevant again, which is very unlikely taking into account the last years history.
Myself as a FF user i'm more and more tempted to switch to some other multiplatform-chrome-compatible browser.
The goals have a lot of compatibility, but occasionally come in conflict. And example may illustrate.
If you care about making Firefox good for users, you will work to improve current performance, and prioritize compatibility with badly coded websites. Even if it makes it harder to adopt future standards coming down the pipeline.
If you care about pushing standards, you'll put more energy into those future standards, even at the cost of performance and compatibility with badly coded websites.
Firefox has consistently chosen to prioritize standards that are someone's idea about how to do things better over the real world that exists right now.
Particlulalry if having lots of users is how you influence things, since then you need to provide a good product (or lock users in via some external ecosystem).
Maybe some recent EU legislation moves can help them in the same way the browser choice thing helped.