I understand that this is how you see our actions.

Working on Mozilla, I do not agree with you on multiple points:

> If attracting contributors was such a priority for mozilla, you would think that so many screw-the-users-we-are-doing-this-anyways decisions wouldnt come to pass.

It's way more complex than you present it. Working on a big project, with a solid legacy, will make you face dramatic decisions where each outcome is going to cost. For example, most users, due to their vested interest in one outcome, and lack of understanding of the cost of the other (they're not going to spend countless hours maintaining legacy APIs), would say "Keep legacy extension system forever". But as a module owner of Gecko, you understand the tremendous cost of doing it.
The decision you're making is way more complex and multi-factored that the decision those users made when they voiced their opinion.

Trying to say that "if you care about being open source project, do what users tell you to" is imho only possible if you don't understand the complexity.

See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma for details.

> its best to not to ignore the feedback users give (note telemetry metrics arnt feedback, especially when interpreted with an agenda, stuff dosent always measure what you think it does).

I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying here.
Telemetry tells us what happens. Feedback tells us what users want to happen.
Telemetry done right gives us representation of the population, feedback gives us the representation of the sample that voiced their opinion.

Loud minority can sway the discussion in any way (WebVR on Linux is the most important thing for Mozilla to work on!). Telemetry gives a different picture (3% of our users are on Linux, and 0.01% of them uses WebVR at all).

You can also see it in this thread. I wrote a blog post about ways to contribute to an open source project. You'd guess the majority of the conversation should be about technicalities involved in contributing discussed among those who want to contribute but have questions.
Instead, majority is about whether Mozilla is doing what the given person wants it to do on a very high meta-level (I want extensions to work this way, or I want data to be collected that way).

There's a substantial difference between those two - one is about a case where an engineer working on Firefox UI filed a bug about switching the way we react to clicks on a button but had no time to fix it. Maybe it also affects you? Maybe you want to go and write a couple lines of JS to fix it? Cool! Let's talk.
The latter is "I have an opinion on privacy policies at Mozilla, and I voiced it together with a number of other individuals who, when asked, say that there should be always less tracking. We brought our pitchforks and loudly demanded it. Now it seems that Mozilla is, after holding a public discussion for months, adding the telemetry which is not in line with what we told them to do so it means they ignored us! Outrageous!"

I'm not saying that we've always done the right thing (I believe we made very high level mistakes on multiple projects, but I also believe I don't have the full knowledge that went behind those decisions, so tt's easy for me to say).
I'm saying that this post is for people who may want to contribute to Mozilla but didn't know how. Sort of "www.whatcanidoformozilla.com" or "#contribute-newbies" style. And "the feedback" is about high level complex decisions that Mozilla is doing that are not in line with the persons opinion. Much more of a "mozilla.governance" or "mozilla.upper-management.decisions" style.

It's easy to have high-level opinions if you don't aim to understand the full complexity of the topic at hand. I can right now tell a government it should stop a war. Any war. Always.
I can tell the government that I'd prefer the taxes to be lower. Or higher.
I can go to Google and say that I'd prefer it they made Android an open source project again.

That's very easy, because I'm not bored with all the details, I'm ignorant when it comes to understanding all the factors, and I just want the outcome.
But saying that those entities "don't listen", just because they won't do what I say they should is imho a wrong conclusion.

> unless you agree with what they have already decided prepare to be ignored

I'm sorry you have this experience with Mozilla. I believe that your voice is heard more often than you think, and judging if your voice was heard solely on if the decision matches your opinion is wrong.

> It seems to be the general conclusion inside mozilla is that Chrome is winning because of x, we need more x, for any value of x

I do not believe you to be correct here.
Firefox team is working on making Firefox the best Firefox possible. Which means that we're building the product we believe to be the best and that involves taking what's best in Safari, Chrome, Edge, Vivaldi etc. if that fits into our idea of a web browser.

People love to see patterns where there are none (see Apophenia) so for years I've heard that each change we make is "copying" someone else. If we switch the back button to the left "we copied Edge", if we switch to the right "we copied Chrome". If we switch tabs to curved, we copied someone, if we switch to rectangular, we copies someone else and so on.
If we add something that other browsers don't do, there's generally silence, until someone starts claiming that we add unnecessary shit that bloats the browser :)

I tend to believe that the reason for that is there are a lot of people and for each decision a small subset of them that is not happy voices their opinion. And if the crowd is large enough, every opinion will be unpopular with some minority which will start vocally opposing it.
So if you look for feedback, it'll be always there, and predominantly negative for every decision that is a matter of preference.

Now, there are things that aren't a matter of preference in a general sense - performance, stability, security etc. I believe that V8 gained a lot of users by doing those things well, and I don't think there's anything wrong with us aiming to match or bypass V8.

> I wish that firefox cared more about being firefox, and less about becomming a worse version of chrome.

I hope that 57 will fit that description for you :)

> [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/8.... feedback here is virtually 100% negative, but I gaurentee this change is going in anyways.

I don't know where it'll go, but I believe that the decision which doesn't agree with feedback does not equate not hearing the feedback, or the feedback not mattering.
I hope you understand that it's a complex, multi-factored problem that is not easly solvable with simple solutions.

Anyhoo, I respect your perspective, I'm sorry this is your experience. I hope my personal opinion helped you see that there are other ways to see it.
At the same time, I'm just an engineer on the project, so I can't speak for the high-level decisions as much as I can talk about technical details of the platform and contributing to it. Which I wrote a blog post about. :)