Let's be honest here. There's nothing Mozilla can do to prolong the life of Firefox. Once you lose marketshare it's more expensive to gain it back. Just look at what Microsoft spent at getting IE/Edge to where they are today. And Mozilla is in a worse position than Microsoft.
Strange, from my perspective Firefox is very widely used.
And for me Chrome/Chromium has just to many usability bugs, to be used productive. E.g. Tabbar doesn't scroll, not very good extensions available (e.g. regex search) and its more difficult to select head of tail of the url (in firefox just click in middle and drag down/up wards)
In terms of marketshare Firefox is in the single digits now. Regardless of what is the better browser Firefox is, relative to Chrome and IE, not that widely used.
It matters to the search engines that pay Mozilla for that default search setting plus royalties for referrals. Which in turn funds all of their projects including Firefox.
It also matters to developers. Who even tests on Opera, which is ~1% of market share? Once people stop caring about whether your browser works, you lose all ability to lead how browsers work.
webcompat.com is a Mozilla initiative for users to report bugs for websites that don't work cross-browser. Mozilla staff and volunteers then reach out to the website's developers. It's disheartening that many web developers can't be bothered to test Firefox or Edge.
Mozilla started from Netscape which had already lost a lot of market share before surging back. Browsers are free which makes it fairly easy to gain or lose marker share. All it takes is the current leader to stumble and people quickly jump ship. I suspect it's easer to catch up as you have some goal to target.
Mozilla was spun out from Netscape but it itself is not Netscape as Netscape was aquired by AOL. 89% is still a far cry from anything Firefox has managed.
Either way you look at it Netscape did not bounce back.
