It took til 2010 for them to realize that the future is mobile?! Why would we be looking to Mozilla for leadership on anything?
iPhone came out in 2007, one could argue that mobile was growing fast even before the iPhone. By 2010 Android was a huge thing too. So, what took Mozilla 3 years to figure out about mobile exactly? Even Opera seemed to see mobile as a huge deal long before 2010.
Open source needs near-commodity hardware with open specs and kernel source (mostly). Otherwise the hardware vendor uses its secrets to build a proprietary software stack.
We had Minimo, MicroB, etc. before 2010, for all the good it did. Were you paying attention? Did you see any open source smartphone winners back then? I did not.
Android did help flatten and uplift the smartphone space, and make it open. Qualcomm helped too. Kudos to those two!
The Facebook "phone" approach is interesting: take over the phone to such a degree that it delivers a FB "experience". No dependencies of the Evil Triangle of the cell world: Handset mfgr, OS provider, Carrier.
Yet Moz apparently is looking to become another OS provider? I'm wondering if they might take the FB approach instead.
FB will succeed now with Android, there appears to be no App Store issues. But my bet they'll also force Apple to cry Uncle! relatively soon. Now THAT would be progress
We have a launcher-based approach in the works too. IMHO it's not going to sweep the world, and neither is FB Home.
Strategically, the big problem all such approaches face remains, and it may even get worse as Android matures. Google owns that OS and controls its APIs and rules for extensions.
Anyway, Android 4 doesn't even fit on 256M phones single-core phones, where Firefox OS is entering the market. It is priced out of the launch countries.
So taking a high-end-focused Android-only approach of "[do an FB-Home-like launcher] instead" does not make sense tactically or strategically.
"Also" rather than "instead" can help, we're exploring in the context of Firefox for Android and the Web Runtime based on it -- but it's not exclusively & clearly winning such that we would bet Mozilla on it.
iPhone came out in 2007, one could argue that mobile was growing fast even before the iPhone. By 2010 Android was a huge thing too. So, what took Mozilla 3 years to figure out about mobile exactly? Even Opera seemed to see mobile as a huge deal long before 2010.