Disagree, XUL was a dead end that either needed shooting behind the bike shed or it’d have taken Mozilla down with it inevitably. It froze their internal architecture to a design that didn’t care about multicore or modern security. Switching to a proper extension api (it didn’t matter if it was chromes or their own, only that they are willing to make their own decisions, like in manifest v3).

That said, I suspect the real death blow was when they killed servo, that project was their distant salvation, a chance to genuinely outcompete technologically and direct where browsers need to go next. I too hope I’m wrong and they can figure out a path forward, but they’ve shown little ambition from the top, so I’m not holding my breath.

Edit: you could argue that the solution to XUL should have been an upgrade to modern design rather than death, but that would have just been an expensive temporary reprieve, the world doesn’t stop changing, it was always going to be slow to correct to whatever direction they needed to go next (and meanwhile every extension dev would be screaming murder every time they killed some braindead api designed 20 years ago).

Bits are also a unit of information from information theory. In that context they are relevant for anything that processes information, regardless of methodology, you can convert analogue signals into bits just fine.

They didn’t “build” their business model on it so much as “clung desperately onto the only lifeline in existence to avoid drowning in debt”.

There really isn’t a plan b, it’s not like they’re refusing to switch to the obviously better business models out there that could replace their search money. There just aren’t many business models that can maintain the development costs of a web browser and engine.

Great game! Just be glad you don’t have to swap the cd every 20 clicks. Riven was basically 1 disc per cutscene when it first came out and I remember getting very frustrated as a kid when I accidentally triggered an island switch and knew it’d be 10 minutes until I could get back.

At least they were banned from using AI screening for 5 years.

I’d hope breaking a court order would result in the kind of punishments they would actually fear.