Mitchell has written Mozilla in the New Internet Era, a post on the future direction of Mozilla, which I recommend to you.
If I had to summarise it in one short sentence, it would be “Goal 2 is incredibly important”. And I absolutely agree with that.
Mitchell says: “With Firefox, we won this first round of the fight for user sovereignty.” That’s also true, and something we can be very proud of. I think we have to keep working if we want to hold on to that victory, and Mitchell’s post makes it clear she agrees. She writes in the comments that “keeping Firefox vibrant remains really important to building an open web platform”. We need to keep working on Goal 1.
But if both goals are still in play, the issue remains: what we do about the fact that some ways of working towards Goal 2 harm our work on Goal 1?
Can we afford to distribute something called «Firefox» on platforms so locked-down and closed that they forbid the use of the Gecko engine?
Like you, like Robert O’Callahan, I think it would be blurring the distinction between «true» Firefox (based on Gecko) and «ersatz» Firefox (based on Webkit or Trident or whatever)
IMHO, we could distribute some «Mozilla» product for use on such platforms, but it should be visibly different from Firefox; indeed, IMHO it should be made clear that distributing under the trademark «Firefox» anything not built on Gecko would be a trademark infringement: it would be distributing what many of us regard as an inferior product under our trademarked name and logo. But Mozilla could, and maybe even should (if it can) distribute «some» browser (named something else than Firefox) and «some» mailer (named something else than Thunderbird) for use on those locked-down non-Gecko platforms. Maybe the logos could be similar but in grayscaleinstead of Firefox-orange and Thunderbird-blue — or something.