Those were very preliminary ventures and not anything that commanded substantial developer resources, so I don't know what you're talking about. And look. I obviously disagree with people who claim that side bets compromised Mozilla, but the arguments sort into different tiers with some being understandable (issues with adtech, CEO pay), some in the middle (the non profit Mozilla Foundation is bloated!), some that are one step up from utter nonsense because they're at least expressed in coherent sentences but have little to no supporting evidence or theory of cause and effect (e.g. "Mozilla lost all its market share due to their side bets being prohibitively expensive").
But we're at a point where apparently these arguments have been seen and repeated so many times that there's a new class of commenters who have been making the lowest effort versions of these arguments that I've yet seen, and are the least interested in anything like evidence or logic or responsiveness to questions or anything that I would associate with coherent thought. Which is where I would put the blockchain argument.
Are you sure they intended them to be preliminary? Maybe they backed off when they saw their users' opinion about Web 3-4-5 or whatever number the blockchain "evangelists" picked out.
In 3-5 years if Firefox will still be around are you going to tell me their "AI" initiative was just preliminary too?
What I'm talking about is trust again. Easily lost, hard to gain back. As I said elsewhere, I want a guarantee that my money is only spent on the actual browser before I donate.
You're free to donate for "AI" of course.
>Lawyer: Diiiid... you kill her?!
>Judge: For the last time no!
>Caption: The defense was going poorly.
https://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=210
Cut from the lawyer to you, saying "Are you sure they intended them to be preliminary?" Same thing.