"I'm hoping that Mozilla is going to extend their support for iOS based devices"

Mozilla would love to do this. It's Apple and their "no JIT compilers other than the one in Safari" rule that's the problem. (And do they have a "no HTML rendering engines other thank Webkit" rule as well? I can't remember.)

At one point in the past someone got Firefox running on iPhone, but it only worked on jailbroken phones due to the above rules.

Very nice! It is really great to see people do something interesting with the Firefox Home source code!

Why is the number of tabs limited to eight (in this browser and in Safari; Chrome doesn't have a limit AFAIK)?

To make you happy (in case you weren't aware before): Safari on iOS 6 can open up to 24 tabs! (and before, IIRC it was limited to 9 not 8) - You can't imagine how wonderful it is to have more than 9 tabs!

That is already on my todo list for the next release.