A foundational goal of the B2G project is to explore and remedy areas where current Web standards are insufficient for building modern mobile applications. Instead of haphazardly grafting vendor-specific markup or extensions into the application runtime, Mozilla will seek to propose new standards to address the challenges that emerge during development.
Nicely aligns with their main aim of promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web.[2]
[1] http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/07/mozilla-eyes...
For example, DOS was not replaced by another OS but was subsumed by a DOS application, Windows 3.1, which eventually grew down and became a standalone OS in Windows 95.
This is the #1 blocker to mobile web app adoption. Try viewing a SVG on a mobile browser and see what happens. You're flipping a coin. Why doesn't Mozilla focus on bringing mobile/desktop feature parity before adding device level APIs?
There are additional optimizations that can be done, of course--the ARM assembly generated by current JITs is not of quite the same quality as the x86 assembly, because the architectures are structured differently and ARM was shoe-horned in afterwards. Different ways of performing operations do better on ARM than on x86--the architectures have different performance characteristics. In point of fact, some of the JS team at Mozilla has shifted focus to improving ARM code generation.
Second, you are assuming that everyone at Mozilla works on the same single project. This is simply not so. There will still be a significant team of people working on improving the current mobile Firefox. This new project is distinct.
I'm completely supportive of this project, and would probably use it on my personal phone, I just wonder if Mozilla isn't already stretched too thin.
I'd love to be able to get excited about this, but sadly I can't. Here's why: http://xkcd.com/927/
Plus, like someone already said, Mozilla is maybe stretching itself a bit too thin.
Right now a significant part of mobile OEMs wants mobile widget engine technology..such as BONDi..Mozilla could be ahead of the game by putting BONDi inside their engine for mobile..
My bias; exactly 18 months ago was interviewed by Mozilla for an xml dev job and suggested that very path.
