Not sure if you're trolling or not (you probably are), but in 2nd and 3rd world countries Internet Cafes and cellphones are the primary means of Internet access...

If Firefox wants to be a cutting edge testing environment for whizbangs great, make that clear. If it wants to be used in production environments where long term stability and available time for internal test cycles trump access to whizbangs then this is bad.

Take a guess which one Mozilla cares about.

Regardless of who is setting the standard, it *is* an open standard, implementable by anyone who reads the spec. Flash is not. Big difference.

Because the full featured Firefox browser is coming to Android.

http://blog.vlad1.com/2010/02/02/android-progress-more-pixels-edition/

Fuck off.

suck it, you dumb slashdot filter

They hope to avoid liability.

1: You're missing the point. The point is that developers will move to browser independent webapps rather than writing an iPhone+blackberry app+htc touch app, etc.
2: Web browsers are not appropriate for everything, but they're becoming increasingly faster, and increasingly more appropriate for more intense tasks.
3: There's already lots of subscription websites - Mozilla need not do anything to support this - people can do this on their own.
4: The browser already has access to everything you listed: camera, accelerometers, GPS, and multitouch. And yes, the hardware is abstracted away by the platform and made available through a standard API.