It's selective bias. I, like many other professional application and systems engineers who didn't originate in the web space, wouldn't participate in Mozilla, nor try to work there.

I'm just not interested in continuing to try fit the square peg of DOM/CSS/JS into the round hole being an application platform. It has been made clear from Brendan (for at least half a decade now, if memory serves) that this is what they're doing and will continue to do.

In the meantime, iOS and Android appeared from nowhere and turned the engineering departments of many companies -- most of which were previously focused solely on server+web -- on their head.

At the same time, Google can barely give Chrome Books away. This must tell you something about the efficacy of these strategies.

iOS and Android are successful because they offer a great selection of powerful APIs, not because of the particular binary representation they use for applications.

NaCl actually offers crappier APIs than the Web platform, and it runs in a box where it can't directly manipulate the real Web APIs. asm.js is intriguing because it offers a very natural path to a foreign function interface to all the stuff exposed to JS.

> iOS and Android are successful because they offer a great selection of powerful APIs, not because of the particular binary representation they use for applications.

They also provide great battery life and user-visible performance (iOS especially), have incredibly well integrated development tools (see Apple's Instruments and its power, CPU, syscall, et al profiling), and give software authors the escape hatches they need to maximize performance when absolutely necessary.

It's not just a question of nice APIs. Layering another level of JavaScript spit and bubblegum on top of the problem is t going to make any of the above easier.