What was the point of Firefox? IE was free and was a proven and already well-established browser. By your logic, we never should have built Firefox and the Web should have stalled with IE6 in 2002.

The world needs a truly open mobile OS as much as it needed a truly open browser a decade ago. Android is open in name only and Google is hurriedly moving its most lucrative components into closed proprietary services and apps that aren't a part of open source Android. iOS is as closed as everything Apple does. Windows is getting some nice HTML5 support for apps, but not nearly enough. There's clearly an opportunity for HTML5 apps to compete on mobile if someone can build a solid alternative platform to the monopolies and silos we're all stuck with today.

I don't think the so-called slashdot effect is in effect these days except for casual and amateur sites. Pretty much any serious site can handle a hard slashdot hit any more.

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.

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.

Which phones with 128MB or 256MB of RAM run a modern version of Android?

Firefox OS is trying to fix much of this.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firef...
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
The Web is the most successful platform of all time and we're leading the pack on bringing a the Web platform to mobile in a way that's integrated rather than fractured like the existing app store models.

Can you point me to the bug you're talking about? Thanks.

If you don't use any social providers, you'll never enable the social integration features in Firefox. Mozilla has hundreds of engineers working to make Firefox better. Not everyone is going to find value in what every one of them are working on. Social API is a small team, just a handful of developers, working on something that *will* be useful to hundreds of millions of Facebook and other social service users.

The Firefox Social API doesn't allow for the sidebar or other social features to know about the content of the pages you're visiting. You can read the docs if you want to learn more. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Social_API

It's not an opt-out. It's an opt in. Users who don't want to see it won't. You'll only see it if you're using a supported social service and you opt in. Otherwise you'll never know it was there.

The feature is there for those who want it and not for those who don't. It's "off by default" and only enabled if you are using a service that supports it (like Facebook today) and you opt in to it.

The API doesn't allow for the sidebar or other social features to know about the content of the pages you're visiting. You can read the docs if you want to learn more. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Social_API

This is simply inaccurate. Firefox 10 (via changes that arrived way back at Firefox 7) was dramatically better than Firefox 4-6 and Firefox 15 was a good bit better than Firefox 10, thanks to killing add-on leaks and some other minor but incremental improvements in Firefox 11, 12, 13, and 14.

Or to put it another way, Firefox 7 and Firefox 15 both made major advances in memory usage. More memory and performance optimizations hit in 16 or will in upcoming releases with Incremental Garbage Collection, IonMonkey, and then a Compacting Generational GC.

I realize that unsupported assertions based on anecdotes is the norm around here, but expect to get called when they're the opposite of the truth. For the details, read the last few months worth of posts here: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/

I know a few ppl will try to use market share agreement

This has little to do with market share now. Microsoft consented to a legally binding agreement with the European Commission. You might not approve of that agreement, but Microsoft and their division of anti-trust lawyers did agree to it. Now it would seem that Microsoft is in violation of that legally binding agreement and the EC is rightly talking with Microsoft about that.

Should companies be able to sign legally binding deals with governments and then simply ignore them?