You really think this sort of decision, complete with all the negotiations involved, was made over the course of a month?

1) A third party is writing the plugin.
2) We did wait until it was inevitable. Every single other browser is already shipping it, Netflix is using it, and other sites are starting to use it. The only alternative to shipping this was to make sure Netflix and other video sites continued to work with Flash or Silverlight _and_ that Flash and Silverlight continue to work indefinitely.

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...

Episodes I through III are only on here so our wise poll overlords can track down anyone who clicks on them, freeze them in carbonite, and ship them off to re-education camps.

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-...

I'll stick with my Sirius Cybernetics Happy Vertical People Mover, thank you very much. It may be a bit unhinged, but damnit, it gets me where I need to go (well, when it's not sulking in the basement, anyway).

Wow, I actually didn't notice that until I saw your post. Total deal breaker, which is tragic, I was all about this phone up until the moment of realization. I constantly walk around with at least 2 64GB cards in my wallet, Get a phone with large internal storage, keep all my apps on the internal, have bulk data and media on the cards. Without a slot, my entire mobile storage strategy goes right out the window. This seems like an incredibly foolish design decision, and one that will turn away a large part of the phone's potential market, namely people like me who actually store lots of data (video, mostly, people always trip when you connect your phone to their TV and start playing quality HD movies instead of the trifling low-bitrate shit they're used to from Netflix and the like). The ones most likely to miss this feature are probably the same kind of folks who've been playing with Cyanogenmod for years, too (again, me). And seriously, what would a slot have done to the price of the phone? I'd happily pay the extra to have an SD slot.

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.

Mozilla is not a public company. It is a 501C3 tax exempt non profit and its wholly owned taxable subsidiary. Our stockholders are the people of the world. Our decisions are based on maximizing the value of the Internet for the benefit of everyone everywhere, especially those who lack representation from the giant institutional multinational publicly traded corporations like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.