Mozilla decided to create B2G for several reasons, but one of them is because most of the world's population in the near future will be accessing the internet from a phone or _maybe_ a tablet, not a full-on laptop or desktop. And people using phones or tablets don't install non-default web browsers, statistically speaking, not least because storage is pretty limited on phones, so if Mozilla wanted to be in the market at all it needed to be shipping the default browser on a phone people would use.

There was also the reason of wanting a phone/tablet marketplace without vendor lock-in, which requires apps to be portable between phones from different vendors. That's where web apps come in. And yes, apps that you can move to your new phone even if you get it from a different manufacturer are intrinsically more valuable than apps that you lose if you move from iOS to Android or vice versa.

As for why you'd go for Firefox OS over Android, one answer is it performs better on limited hardware (think a phone with 256 megs ram, and yes, it's pretty hilarious what counts as "limited hardware" nowadays). If you say you're not likely to be buying a phone with those sorts of hardware specs, then you're not the target market. Remember what I said about "most of the worlds population" above? Well, the total population of Europe and North America is about 25% of the population of the world. The other 75% is not out to buy $600 phones. Neither are parts of Europe and North America, of course...

The search bar is there for a simple reason. It's to allow a place to do searches with search autosuggest without sending every single URL you type to the search provider.

Chrome adopts the "send all the URLs the user types to the search provider" approach by default, unsurprisingly.

Of course if you don't care about the search autosuggest feature, you can just customize away the search bar.

Actually, they do not have that right. Employers in California are explicitly prohibited from doing that. See California Labor Code section 1102 at http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-...

Just to be clear, I think the Eich thing was a witch-hunt. As is the counter-witch-hunt.

It's absolutely true. There were a bunch of blog posts by Mozilla employees supporting Brendan as CEO (even though many disagreed with his position on Prop 8), all completely ignored by the media. Looking at the relevant date range on http://planet.mozilla.org/ should find them...

Uh.... Christie Koehler explicitly said she thought Brendan would do a good job as CEO. So I'm a bit confused about why you're lumping her into your list.

Three board members didn't quit over Brendan's presence as CEO. But the Wall Street Journal _did_ make up a story to that effect, which has gotten widely quoted, and refused to retract it when it was pointed out it was false.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/... has a Q&A on the issue, but basically two of the board members had wanted to move on to other things for a while but stuck it out until the end of the CEO search (because that was the board's primary job at the time). They left the board as soon as a CEO was chosen, a week or two before the choice was even announced.

The third board member who left did leave because he did not think Brendan would make a good CEO, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the Prop 8 mess.

Just for context, a number of Mozilla employees spoke up in support of Brendan during the goings on (twitter, blogs, etc).

Further, he explicitly asked people to keep working on the Mozilla mission, even without him. Keep in mind that Mozilla is not just a company; most people who are there aren't there just for the paycheck...

Now obviously they (we?) could have gone ahead and just imploded the Mozilla project over this issue by leaving. Would that have made Brendan feel better? I sort of doubt that.

There is a difference between "self determination" and "referendum performed under armed guard, with no international election observers allowed into the country", but it's a subtle one, I grant. That said, it's the sort of difference that can give you a 95% "Join Russia" vote, with 80% turnout (76% of total voters, if you do the math) in a region where at most 60% of the population is ethnic Russian and at least 10% (the Tatars) are _extremely_ unlikely to have vote for union with Russia.

If you think those referendum results are fair and represent self-determination, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

You need an account if you want to use Mozilla's sync service.

If you don't want to use sync, or if you want to run your own sync server instead of using Mozilla's, then you don't need an account.

Uh... They do have gas. In Crimea. See http://www.reuters.com/article...

Assuming the extension works on Chrome on iOS. Which it may not, since that uses a fairly different architecture and rendering engine from Chrome on other platforms...

For what it's worth, "millions of dollars" is a pretty low bar. A million dollars in the US will get you _maybe_ 5 person-years worth of work from anyone at all competent (using the normal rule of thumb that an employees cost to the employer is about 2x salary once you take into account benefits, employer taxes, equipment, office space, etc).

So 10 million dollars will get you a 10 years worth of work from 5 developers. As an example, the PyPy project is 10 years old....

For JS, between the various browser vendors, the right number is probably closer to 300-500 person-years (see https://news.ycombinator.com/i... for an attempted breakdown). Figure $100 million as a low estimate. Chances are, the people involved are being paid more than $100k a year, so adjust the estimate up accordingly...

1. All addons hosted by Mozilla get reviewed.
2. Open source is not required, but source disclosure to Mozilla is.
3. Any update to the addon triggers a new review cycle.

The other option is to review updates to extensions before pushing them out to users. That's what Mozilla does with Firefox extensions.