Mozilla had their shot at being the leading edge browser, and, heck, maybe they even were for a while. But at some point in the history of Mozilla / Seamonkey / Firefox they started to care way too much about "market share" and started treating IE as though it was the target. Discussions about implementing new standards or new features ended with "but IE doesn't do that", etc.
And then Mozilla became very inimical towards the idea of implementing forward looking things, and giving ideas a chance to win or lose in the "marketplace" (not a perfect metaphor, but whatever). Remember the debacle over mng support? The argument basically reduced to "nobody's using it" at a time when no browsers supported it. And nobody was going to use it, until some browser(s) did support it. But IE didn't, and IE was the target. Oh yeah, there was some argument about the size of the code, etc., yada yada, but even when the developers reduced the size of the mng code dramatically, it was still rejected.
Mozilla leadership never seemed willing to try and lead and expect IE to begin to see Firefox as the target. XForms? Mozilla absolutely should have implemented XForms properly. The one place they did actually get "ahead of the curve" a bit was SVG, and - while still hardly dominant - SVG has finally made into IE.
Honestly, while Firefox is a great product in many ways (I'm using it to compose this post) I think it has fallen short of what it could be, and one reason for that - IMO - is an overly dogmatic, top-heavy leadership model and lack of willingness to incorporate feedback from the larger OSS community.
The point is that it doesn't f%!@#ng matter... Mozilla, at one time, tried to foster this idea that they were the "browser for developers" and had this notion of implementing new technologies and letting them fight it out in the marketplace, yada yada. But they didn't actually do that. They made heavy-handed decisions about what technologies would or wouldn't "win", mostly based in trying to replicate IE. And now they're still talking about "innovating faster" blah, blah, and I'm still not buying it.
Mozilla has shown little interest in leading in terms of browser innovation, from what I've seen. Of course, the argument now has probably changed from "IE doesn't do that" to "Chrome doesn't do that", but whatever...
Edit: Also, just to be clear... I'm not saying Mozilla never do anything innovative. They were, for example, one of the first, if not the first, browsers to support MathML. They were also early to the SVG party. I just think they fell short of what they could have been, if they'd been more aggressive towards incorporating new things. shrug
And then Mozilla became very inimical towards the idea of implementing forward looking things, and giving ideas a chance to win or lose in the "marketplace" (not a perfect metaphor, but whatever). Remember the debacle over mng support? The argument basically reduced to "nobody's using it" at a time when no browsers supported it. And nobody was going to use it, until some browser(s) did support it. But IE didn't, and IE was the target. Oh yeah, there was some argument about the size of the code, etc., yada yada, but even when the developers reduced the size of the mng code dramatically, it was still rejected.
Mozilla leadership never seemed willing to try and lead and expect IE to begin to see Firefox as the target. XForms? Mozilla absolutely should have implemented XForms properly. The one place they did actually get "ahead of the curve" a bit was SVG, and - while still hardly dominant - SVG has finally made into IE.
Honestly, while Firefox is a great product in many ways (I'm using it to compose this post) I think it has fallen short of what it could be, and one reason for that - IMO - is an overly dogmatic, top-heavy leadership model and lack of willingness to incorporate feedback from the larger OSS community.