This was the biggest fumble of the Mozilla strategy in the last 20 years. Instead of focusing on the developer market, particularly after the appearance of WebKit, they bet (half) the farm on a quixotic quest to build a mobile OS from scratch. By attempting to gain a level of control that was always unlikely, they endangered their own survival.
I would have made that same mistake if I was making decisions for Mozilla at the time. It's such an elegant, logical and tempting ideal to turn the browser into the OS. Too bad it didn't work out.
Good luck getting Apple to allow basic features like storage without weird limits, notifications, and the rest of the list. They killed Flash in favor of HTML5+JS and then decided for the walled garden.
