This point needs to be stressed more. Not so much that it is 'open' but that you can write an app and it will run everywhere: Mobile, WEB and DESKTOP. If there are good solutions for this now I am unaware of them. Desktop is still important.

Open is great, but is part of the larger, political issue(s). The marketing has to appeal to the 'what does it buy me'?

>Interestingly, while you seem to consider that this is a weak point of Firefox, we (Mozilla) did this on purpose and we consider this one of the strongest points of the platform: _no vendor lock-in_.

There is already no vendor lock-in with html based apps on Android or iOS. The complaint people have about iOS is that it is locked down with regards to native apps. Mozilla themselves have made this exact complaint about iOS -- that they wanted to write a browser for iOS but could not because a) HTML/Javascript are not suitable for writing a browser so they have to go through the app store and b) native apps in the app store on iOS face restrictions that would limit performance of a Javascript VM, so Firefox would not have competitive performance compared to Safari.

FirefoxOS solves neither of those problems.

More generally, the idea of all user facing software being targeted to a single sandboxed standard API is very restrictive and worrying. It means developers giving up complete control to a small cabal of 4 or 5 large organisations that decide what gets standardised. Organisations that have conflicting interests and financial motivations that certainly don't align with my own. That's assuming that various competing web based platforms would even be sustainable; I don't see it lasting more than 5 mins before platform specific extensions are added to provide additional value over the competitors.

I want to be able to write software for my device and have full access to the hardware without some third party being able to decide what I can and can't do with my phone. FirefoxOS doesn't get me any closer to that goal, in fact it's a step backwards. Web platforms are great for SV startups where raw user numbers are the most important thing, but to be honest I don't give a shit about the ability of the latest photo sharing startup to 'exit'. I do care about people doing much more interesting things and all I can see is web based OSs being a restriction on that. Think about how you would feel living in a world of Gopher based operating systems.

>As you may recall, we (not just Mozilla) did this to the web a few years ago, and look where this brought us all

Yes, a world where I don't control my own data anymore, it lives on some server I can't access, subject to the whims of foreign governments. Being processed by code I can't even reverse engineer never mind read the source or modify. This is great freedom for developers and governments, but utterly disastrous for the freedom of users.

> There is already no vendor lock-in with html based apps on Android or iOS. The complaint people have about iOS is that it is locked down with regards to native apps [...]

We agree on this point.

The strategy chosen by Mozilla with FirefoxOS, for good or for ill, is to standardize upon the subset of applications that have no vendor lock-in, i.e. the html based apps, and then to progressively extend the set of capabilities granted to these applications, while still avoiding the lock-in. Other open mobile OSes make different choices (e.g. Ubuntu mobile), and I personally wish them success. The future will tell us which one, if any, of these attempts to make the world a little more open will succeed.

> I want to be able to write software for my device and have full access to the hardware without some third party being able to decide what I can and can't do with my phone. FirefoxOS doesn't get me any closer to that goal, in fact it's a step backwards. Web platforms are great for SV startups where raw user numbers are the most important thing, but to be honest I don't give a shit about the ability of the latest photo sharing startup to 'exit'. I do care about people doing much more interesting things and all I can see is web based OSs being a restriction on that. Think about how you would feel living in a world of Gopher based operating systems.

That is an interesting point. As all new generation, high-level platforms, FirefoxOS opens some doors and closes others.

Now, I don't know your personal interests, your experience, or exactly what low-level code you want to write, but that reminds me of something I experienced quite a few years ago. At that time, the newly released Windows 95 killed a number of low-level libraries that I had carefully hand crafted using assembly code and BIOS calls and that let me read/write floppy disks with custom formatting, hence guaranteeing that nobody could read my floppy disks without my consent (they could not be ported to Linux either, of course). It also killed my low-level asm-based libraries for direct access to the video card, the libraries that had taken me years to complete, and that I could use to write smooth 256 colors side-scrollers.

Well, I survived that loss. A few years have passed. Now, FirefoxOS is the first platform I have experienced in which I can write a small game prototype in about 2 hours. Some doors have been closed, others have opened.

It may be that FirefoxOS is not the platform of your dreams, if your dreams require you to go low-level. But I believe that, for most of us, FirefoxOS is pretty damn good.

> >As you may recall, we (not just Mozilla) did this to the web a few years ago, and look where this brought us all

> Yes, a world where I don't control my own data anymore, it lives on some server I can't access, subject to the whims of foreign governments. Being processed by code I can't even reverse engineer never mind read the source or modify. This is great freedom for developers and governments, but utterly disastrous for the freedom of users.

While the dangers you describe are very real, you seem to forget the situation we avoided – one in which every single communication on Earth had to go through Microsoft, using proprietary code and protocols, with contagious DRMs & authentication on every single one of your documents, with a single company deciding of the tools at your disposal both for office work and for development.

The fight is far from over – it may never be – and the Mozilla community is part of the frontline, but the open web was a considerable push in the right direction, one that at least gives us a fighting chance.