> And on top of this, Mozilla decided to shoot for (super) low-end devices as their main target - presumably because their bizdev people had spotted a theoretical opportunity, but failed to connect with engineering, or vice-versa.
Having been there (ex mozillian, lots of time spent on FFOS), I wouldn't characterize it like this. The leaders of the project were two engineers, not a pointy hair on their heads (at least at first).
There were certainly plenty of us who felt like trying to cram this much into a low-end device was insanity (when was the last time you saw any web browser use under 128mb of ram?), and we definitely raised this objection. I feel like the pathology I observed was more planning fallacy / overoptimism on the part of engineering leaders than anything else (I'd certainly be the last to claim that I've never been guilty of that).
There's also another fallacy that I don't have a name for, which is basically "this is the only (way we see how) to do it, so we're going to make it work." That is, it was hard to imagine a FFOS device competing with a high-end device, so they decided to focus on the low end. That's the only way we can do it, so we'll make it work. But that causes you to perhaps lose sight of the real question: "can we make it work?"
It's not clear to me whether FFOS would have had a shot if not for the focus on low-end hardware. Having been there, I feel like the architecture itself was really hard to program against. Bugs that should have been easy -- "make sure the alarm clock actually goes off", "don't leak apps" -- required lots of specialized knowledge and time to fix. But certainly a lot of time was also spent on performance/memory optimization.
Just my two cents. A lot of smart people worked hard on this project for many years, and there were many impressive technical accomplishments along the way. Look up Nuwa if you're interested; that shit is nuts.
> They actually have a time-honored tradition of following in the footsteps of Opera when it comes to ways of making money.
"Opera had it first" indeed. :)