Wow, you may want to do some basic checking on your assertions there:
* webOS never used Java, Luna (webOS-to-be) was a skunkworks alternative to the Java-based Prima project. there was java stuff below from Prima, it was not the application core and was never made available to developers
* webOS always used both Webkit and V8 for its application runtime (Palm was the first company to ship a mobile V8 port)
http://blogs.gurulabs.com/dax/2009/06/palm-pre-webos.html
http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-insid...
I was having a brain fart moment last night and meant node when I mentioned v8. Specifically, webOS 2.x+ shipped with node based services which replaced a lot(all/most?) of the java based services.
Those two things IMO were major things affecting webOS. Pretty much all the phone devices shipped with insufficient memory.
And given that Fx OS is JS, HTML etc. based, those things have a tendency to chew up a fair bit of mem. Throw in a JIT and suddenly you are in a mem swap situation (which is definitely not batt friendly).
So, yeah I would like to see more docs about how those are going to be addressed.
For example, they moved from a Java based solution to JS using v8 from webOS 1.x to 2.x.
Hopefully, Firefox OS will not suffer from the same issues. And I would certainly like to hear more about the under-the-hood architecture. It's pretty eye candy but things like power management quickly jump to the forefront when you actually try to use the device as a phone on a regular basis.
As far as the webOS performance issues go, it was less the hardware and more the fact that most of the software were not optimized and shipped with an ENORMOUS amount logging turned on. Put simply, Palm essentially did a "make debug_build" and shipped it.
Not trying to be harsh, just what I have observed from poking around webOS.