Mozilla (Firefox) was our chance for something different. They were ahead of IE once but they watched on and did nothing whilst they had their pockets lined up with Google's money and allowed them (Google) to overtake everyone and now everyone is complaining about it. It even goes back before Chrome was a thing when the Mozilla CEO declared that they could move away from depending on Google's money. [0] Now 14+ years later, they are still unable to do so.
Since then it is only Google (Chrome) and Apple (Safari) again, just like for Android and iOS. All other attempts at stopping them was a complete failure like Firefox OS was and now Mozilla and Firefox are the ones fizzling out of existence as they are unable to make money as the majority of users are running to Chrome, Brave, Edge and Vivaldi.
It is no wonder websites are beginning to not only break on Firefox, but also tell or block users from their web apps to instead use Chrome.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
Really close to gnome 3 spirit, it continuously removed user features and personnalisation.
Gnome 3 really epitomized that but it's a general trend of linux on desktop catching up to proprietary os in first 2 decades culminating with the bonus coolness of compiz fusion.
And then the 2010-2020 were most of the time was spend changing the technologies (removing XUL,going to system-d,wayland) and the user experience suffered.
I think open software has a special responsibility to empower users not only through programming but also through their interface, it can be extension or extensive settings but it has to.
It ends up making more practical, feature reach software and open source needs that because we don't always all the resources to make the most polished software.