There is no short answer to this question, but I'll try to provide an authoritative summary of the situation.
I interned for Mozilla and it's a *crazy* organization: they live stream their staff meetings and there are random people from all over who sit in on them and populate the IRC channel with an immense amount of chatter. At least on the project I was working on, MOST of the contributors were unpaid staff and the paid staff had
way too many managerial responsibilities.
This is good and bad, they are a mission driven company but there is a *very* high noise level. I've seen some research on the Bugzilla database that showed community feedback had no statistically significant impact. It's hard to say how far that generalizes outside of Buzilla but it gives
some insight as to the number of people constantly banging on Mozilla's door asking them to add feature X, Y, or Z.
Take the
Metalink project, they have had add-ons and (I believe) patches for both Firefox and Chrome
for years. They didn't just whine about how Mozilla should do all the hard work just on the principal of the thing: they submitted code, Metalinks have been taken up in by other significant software packages (wget and cURL support it natively , openSUSE uses it for their package manager, etc), and they have even submitted some RFC's to the IETF. Despite all that work, Mozilla still declines to support the format.
However, Mozilla has
lots of people trying to push things into their codebase, a codebase that
they have to maintain. Why haven't they picked up WebP? Because it's not radically better than jpeg and they can't force Microsoft to adopt it. They picked up PNG, WebM, Ogg, and Opus largely over patent disputes. Transparency on PNG is awesome, but they still have to support Gifs because they are animated. Given all of that background, it's really not surprising that Firefox hasn't picked up support for Metalinks: there just isn't an
overwhelming use case.
So what does that mean for .bit? Well, censorship on the web is becoming an overwhelming use case but the Namecoin project isn't in anywhere near the shape of what the Metalinker is in and Namecoin is MUCH bigger! A smaller blockchain format is the least of the engineering headaches adopting .bit will cause. For all the shit we give ICANN and the domain registrars, they have been running DNS for over a decade without a hitch. We can only pray we become as boring as ICANN!
It's possible that they will adopt .bit, but I'm betting that they will instead opt for a formal protocol, meaning that widespread support would be ~5 years from whenever they decide to support it. But, if we become a large enough use-case I think everyone will wake up and smell the need for a decentralized, censorship-resistant name address system.
I would love to hear doublec's feedback on the above, as aIl of this is based on watching the DNS and the internet growing up and a few months as a remote intern. My guess is that Mozilla and others will embrace decentralized DNS when we can deliver a functionally equivalent system (sub 100-millisecond response time, secure protocols, stable networking, IETF working groups, etc) paired with censorship-resistant domain name resolution. Bitcoin is just starting to become accepted by in the mainstream financial markets, it will be another decade before it's a routine part of our lives and .bit is really just getting started....