This would be just speculation, and I could be way off base. This would also be assuming that Mozilla is looking out for the best interest of users, which may or may not be the case.
We saw that when companies like McDonalds could no longer operate in Russia, Russia essentially took the McDonalds and created a knock-off. If Russia decided to ban Firefox, they may just fire up a knock off and sell it to the populace as Mozilla is an evil American corporation so they have created RuskieFox and all that national pride stuff. Would tech saavy people trust the Russian knock off? My guess is the tech saavy people won't and will find ways to get firefox from Mozilla. But the non-tech saavy? Probably not. From this, if we assume Mozilla is doing what it can to protect users (which may or may not be the case), it would be better to comply but Russians get official builds of Firefox than being banned and the Russian government replacing Firefox with their own build.
There's already a Yandex browser, there's no need for a Firefox knock-off.
> Would tech saavy people trust the Russian knock off?
No one with a single brain cell uses the Yandex web browser. It's akin to giving the Russian authorities full access to your entire web presence.
> But the non-tech saavy?
For those Firefox has never existed. Most people in Russia use: Yandex web browser, Opera or Google Chrome.
> From this, if we assume Mozilla is doing what it can to protect users (which may or may not be the case), it would be better to comply but Russians get official builds of Firefox than being banned and the Russian government replacing Firefox with their own build.
Mozilla loses nothing from not complying but gains reputation and trust of not sharing the bed with Putin.
We saw that when companies like McDonalds could no longer operate in Russia, Russia essentially took the McDonalds and created a knock-off. If Russia decided to ban Firefox, they may just fire up a knock off and sell it to the populace as Mozilla is an evil American corporation so they have created RuskieFox and all that national pride stuff. Would tech saavy people trust the Russian knock off? My guess is the tech saavy people won't and will find ways to get firefox from Mozilla. But the non-tech saavy? Probably not. From this, if we assume Mozilla is doing what it can to protect users (which may or may not be the case), it would be better to comply but Russians get official builds of Firefox than being banned and the Russian government replacing Firefox with their own build.