For some reason, everybody feels like they should have a say in the direction of large Free SW projects, even if they have never contributed.
Some criticisms of Mozilla are fair (even if blown out of proportion, like the Pocket issue), but one can not expect a project to make development even more complex by adding a "revert it because this one guy doesn't like it" button for each change or feature.
As a software dev that's received plenty of criticism as well, I'll just say that when I post detailed complaints about things I don't like, it's not because I want to harm or destroy their software. If I truly hated their software, I wouldn't be using it or talking about it at all. For all of Mozilla's faults, the only real cross-platform alternative (Chrome) is even worse. That one forces silent updates, won't let me download and run older versions, won't let me disable WebRTC, was the inspiration for the new Mozilla UI I dislike, sends a lot of data back to Google, etc.
The problem with not complaining is that when everyone does it, the developers have no idea why 30% of their market share is gone, yet everyone who remained is still happy with the changes.
Further, I think really major software projects like Firefox and Gnome are in a different category. People's livelihoods depend on these software programs. Totally changing things around can have serious effects on people, not just those who hate change.
It's one thing to be a single developer working on a solitaire game and deciding to redesign everything; it's quite another to be a multi-million dollar company with hundreds of employees and tens of millions of users and deciding to redesign everything.
When you care about your market share, have employees that depend upon your success, and so forth ... you really should make the effort to listen to your community of users.
And let's not forget the whole reason we're having this discussion is because Mozilla just berated Microsoft for removing user choice. If you're going to criticize someone for their faults that you're every bit as guilty of, you should expect to be called out on your hypocrisy.
As I said, some of the criticisms are fair. At the same time, the kind of issues that we techies tend to complain about are largely not behind that drop in market share: the majority of those users have moved on to browsers that are worse in terms of privacy and security.
It is a tricky issue and the comparison with GNOME is apt. At the end of the day, the last word belongs to the companies and individuals actually doing the work. We on the outside can still try to convince them, of course.
Practically, it's impossible to maintain one without a proportionally large team that can spend proportionally big amount of time.
As one of most obvious examples (unrelated to Mozilla or Microsoft): there are uncountably many custom Android ROMs out there, left abandoned. And most were merely cosmetic changes or even packaging (like inclusion or removal of certain pieces by default). Usually, unless luck is that there's a large social momentum and a lot of advertising among same-minded people, fork maintainer struggles for a few versions then gives up and surrenders to the upstream way of thinking. Sad but true.
Forking usually happens when a group or individual is unable to steer the direction a project. Having to go on your own is pretty much the opposite of "having a say".
Some criticisms of Mozilla are fair (even if blown out of proportion, like the Pocket issue), but one can not expect a project to make development even more complex by adding a "revert it because this one guy doesn't like it" button for each change or feature.