That would take a lot more development effort, since plug-ins depend on a lot of functionality being present in-process with them that's based on libraries that make up a good bit of that 54MB.

On Mac, the plugin process is the same binary as the 32-bit Firefox process...

You mean have it download both versions, on 64-bit, right? It's not a matter of choosing: you need a 32-bit process to run the plug-ins in, and a 64-bit one for the actual browsing.

This is doable, and being worked on; it's just not been a top priority for various reasons.

Mac OS supports shipping both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries in a single executable. That's what Firefox on Mac does.

That _is_ a viable solution on Windows, albeit with multiple executables, but it about doubles the size of the download. Unfortunately, Windows users are very sensitive to the download size for their web browsers; past experiments have shown uptake dropping rapidly as the download size increases.

Your attempt to confuse here isn't really helpful.

Google does *sell* Google Glass and Nexus phones and tablets and Chromecast and Nest and soon Dropcams and probably more. They are "Google products" branded and sold by Google as theirs.

Mozilla only has one device that it works on directly, the Firefox OS Flame reference phone. The rest of the hardware you see out there is being made and sold by someone else.

And that's not just true of the hardware. Much of the work going on to extend Firefox OS software into areas outside of phones is being done by third parties for their products.

Mozilla doesn't build hardware. We make software, including Firefox OS. Firefox OS is a completely open platform freely available for any company to build on top of without restriction. There are dozens of companies building Firefox OS-based products today and there will be more tomorrow, covering mobile phones, tablets, TVs, set top boxes, game consoles, streaming dongles, wearables, and more. Some of those companies are working directly with Mozilla and others are taking the code and running with it on their own.

You're very welcome!

Do you mean the "Load images automatically" setting?

The preference for that seems to still be in about:config. It's called "permissions.default.image" and the values are documented as: // 1-Accept, 2-Deny, 3-dontAcceptForeign

Brendan knew about this and approved of it long ago. Carry on dreaming.

We at Mozilla do not regard popularity as an end in itself. Instead, we regard it as an essential part of our strategy for executing on our mission. The amount of influence we have to make the Internet better is, in many spheres, proportional to Firefox market share.

As to whether we'd lose users due to Netflix, Hulu etc eventually not working in Firefox ... nobody seriously doubts this.

Brad Kuhn misquotes Mitchell. She did not say "an approach", she said "MozillaÃ(TM)s fundamental approach".

You're mischaracterizing Brendan's position on DRM, as I'm sure he would tell you if you just asked him personally. I strongly recommend you do so.

He doesn't like DRM, and neither does anyone else at Mozilla, but you do realize that he was CTO and then CEO while most of the negotiations with Adobe were happening, right?

We've tried sandboxing the plug-in process Flash runs in. It breaks all sorts of existing Flash-using stuff, unfortunately.

The benefit of having a sandbox from day 1 is that you don't have that problem.

The difference is that the CDM will be sandboxed in a low-privilege process with no direct access to the OS and kernel, which is not at all how Flash works.

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...