> There is already no vendor lock-in with html based apps on Android or iOS. The complaint people have about iOS is that it is locked down with regards to native apps [...]
We agree on this point.
The strategy chosen by Mozilla with FirefoxOS, for good or for ill, is to standardize upon the subset of applications that have no vendor lock-in, i.e. the html based apps, and then to progressively extend the set of capabilities granted to these applications, while still avoiding the lock-in. Other open mobile OSes make different choices (e.g. Ubuntu mobile), and I personally wish them success. The future will tell us which one, if any, of these attempts to make the world a little more open will succeed.
> I want to be able to write software for my device and have full access to the hardware without some third party being able to decide what I can and can't do with my phone. FirefoxOS doesn't get me any closer to that goal, in fact it's a step backwards. Web platforms are great for SV startups where raw user numbers are the most important thing, but to be honest I don't give a shit about the ability of the latest photo sharing startup to 'exit'. I do care about people doing much more interesting things and all I can see is web based OSs being a restriction on that. Think about how you would feel living in a world of Gopher based operating systems.
That is an interesting point. As all new generation, high-level platforms, FirefoxOS opens some doors and closes others.
Now, I don't know your personal interests, your experience, or exactly what low-level code you want to write, but that reminds me of something I experienced quite a few years ago. At that time, the newly released Windows 95 killed a number of low-level libraries that I had carefully hand crafted using assembly code and BIOS calls and that let me read/write floppy disks with custom formatting, hence guaranteeing that nobody could read my floppy disks without my consent (they could not be ported to Linux either, of course). It also killed my low-level asm-based libraries for direct access to the video card, the libraries that had taken me years to complete, and that I could use to write smooth 256 colors side-scrollers.
Well, I survived that loss. A few years have passed. Now, FirefoxOS is the first platform I have experienced in which I can write a small game prototype in about 2 hours. Some doors have been closed, others have opened.
It may be that FirefoxOS is not the platform of your dreams, if your dreams require you to go low-level. But I believe that, for most of us, FirefoxOS is pretty damn good.
> >As you may recall, we (not just Mozilla) did this to the web a few years ago, and look where this brought us all
> Yes, a world where I don't control my own data anymore, it lives on some server I can't access, subject to the whims of foreign governments. Being processed by code I can't even reverse engineer never mind read the source or modify. This is great freedom for developers and governments, but utterly disastrous for the freedom of users.
While the dangers you describe are very real, you seem to forget the situation we avoided – one in which every single communication on Earth had to go through Microsoft, using proprietary code and protocols, with contagious DRMs & authentication on every single one of your documents, with a single company deciding of the tools at your disposal both for office work and for development.
The fight is far from over – it may never be – and the Mozilla community is part of the frontline, but the open web was a considerable push in the right direction, one that at least gives us a fighting chance.