- ease of development

- leveraging gains in the platform development

At this point, the web is already the biggest app store the world has ever seen. FFOS succeeded in one of the most difficult areas of building a new platform -- getting companies to write progressive web apps that ran on the phone. I even spent time writing little utilities, a tinder clone, and an instagram clone for the platform.

There are at least 3 big companies with huge dedicated teams to making that platform better and faster. Slowness can definitely be an issue but that's a lot more solvable than a dearth of applications or a lack of open interest in improving the platform. Optimization is a long-tail problem, and it's clear by android's dominance and the progressive slowing of apple software every year that you just have to be good enough, but hardware goes a long way to help.

Even more than this the biggest problem was the market FFOS was aimed for didn't give FFOS time to go down the optimization path. You can mask inefficient software with beefy hardware, and I actually had two firefox phones that worked wonderfully -- the Flame[0] and the Fx0[1]. Those two phones only scratched the surface of how powerful the hardware could be, and I didn't have any of the problems you mention. I still have 2 (!) FX0s in my closet somewhere.

[0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox_OS/Flame

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/B2G_OS/Phon...