> But what does "having principles" translate to? Focusing on the EME issue, how many people are going to be like "humpf, firefox added EME so I'm going to use chrome instead!"? Is that small slice of the user base even worth keeping? If they're going to be incensed by random issues like this, they're probably not worth the trouble to cater to, or maybe they'll just flip flop between chrome and firefox (depending on what the latest outrage headline is) that there's not much point in catering to.
> If you can't articulate specific benefits to "having principles", then you're not really interested in firefox winning, you just want it to die a martyr.
You've got it backwards. It's not that people use Chrome in retaliation for Firefox having zero principles, it's that people stop caring to install Firefox because there's no clear reason to keep using it.
Having no principles itself eventually loses you a small minority of users... and those were your core supporters and evangelists. It is not a huge number of people, but it's not good when your base of supporters is rotting from the inside-out.