You are totally wrong on the wasted effort. FirefoxOS actually pushed a lot of the performance improvements that are seen as wonderful in this release. I kind of LOLed when people re-discovered things like how sync layout was bad. So much knowledge was lost in Moz when they killed FxOS that it's a showcase of bad leadership.

The desktop browser was stagnating because the browser owners had no idea where to drive it, and some people with the castle keys were change adverse (some finally "left"). They took as an excuse that they could not get support from the platform team, so the platform team killed FxOS support and ended up being absorbed by the Firefox organization to become just the fx backend team (great strategy!). I guess the platform VP was so frightened by the Tofino experiment and Fx Desktop moving away from Gecko that he didn't understand that was betting on the wrong horse long term.

Well, in general, I don't see Quantum as elevating the concerns of desktop over mobile. Moving to parallel implementations of functionality can help even more on mobile than on desktop, since Android phones have tended to embrace multicore faster than desktop has. (Apple phones are a different story, but Gecko obviously can't be relevant there, and even Apple is finally moving to high core counts in the past year.)

Patrick, you know that the MoCo has focused 110% on desktop the last 1.5 year. Or if you don't, you should ask the Android platform team (eg. snorp).

They had to try. Mobile devices are way more restrictive than the PC ever was. The companies that dominate the OS have unprecedented power and leverage.

If Mozilla's goal is to strengthen the interests of a wide range of users against the narrow interests of two or three oligopolists they have to consider entering the OS game in spite of the immense difficulties.