While Firebase largely worked in PhoneGap prior to the latest releases, there were a few outstanding bugs specific to PhoneGap deployments that required special handling or attention, though websockets were not directly affected. As a sample, we had some previous errors around long-polling and creating iframes (used as a fallback when websockets fail) in PhoneGap, and most notably Firebase Simple Login was entirely unsupported in PhoneGap applications until this latest release.
I thought firebase supported html5 a long time ago.
Is it the websocket part that couldn't be ported to Phonegap?