The last thing Mozilla needs is to spend more time pretending they're a big tech company and can compete with those guys. They should focus on Firefox (as GP said), not build a communication platform that will then fail versus Signal/WhatsApp/Hangouts/Teams/etc.
Yup. Someone else will likely do a better job building those. Mozilla's (and only Mozilla's) core competency is browser building, and they should stick to it. Anyone can build a communicator, but building a full browser engine is becoming a forgotten skill.
The decline of Firefox started with Chrome's JavaScript engine, who was years ahead of Firefox's performance. The focus on JavaScript-heavy websites was already growing, and Firefox was slow to catch up.
Now they're about the same performance-wise, but the mind share lost was brutal. there was a period that the only advantages Firefox had over Chrome were memory use and extensions, and they had to get rid of the NPAPI extensions for security reasons.
The basic problem for Mozilla is they poured a ton of effort into improving performance and marketed that heavily... and they basically didn't gain back share at all.
