I think one basic problem with Firefox OS being a "developer-first" thing is the devices it's being shipped on. Of course, a $33 phone is a very cool thing to be able to do.
But as a developer, a lot of my disposable income is going to be directed towards gadgets and a $33 phone is just a decade behind the types of phones I would actually use myself.
I think that to attract developers, Mozilla should aim to find a partner that will ship a current-generation phone with Firefox OS. Asking people to install it themselves on a Galaxy based on a slightly screwed-up wiki page isn't exactly what I want for my personal every-minute-of-the-day phone.
Note that the current developer/reference hardware is quite different from the $33 Spreadtrum/Intex phone launching in India. The "Flame" developer phone retails for US$170 (after shipping):
That's still nowhere near the same spec class as a $400+ iPhone or Android flagship, but compared to the Spreadtrum device, the Flame has 8 times more RAM, more than double the screen resolution, better cameras, dual-core 1.2GHz CPU, and other goodies like NFC.
True high-end devices will come eventually. I agree that it will help a lot when there's a fully-supported high-end phone that can more easily replace iPhone or Android as a developer's personal phone.
But then those developers will develop for that new phone, creating a bunch of stuff that will not run on the older phones.
Since those older phones are Mozilla's target market it would be an odd choice to make.
It's a little bit like the WWW where people (rightly) develop on very powerful hardware but often (wrongly) fail to test on a range of normal hardware. (This is also ignoring the fact that stuff written for the WWW should not need testing because it should all be standards compliant etc).
To your last point: It is extremely hard to test your HTML/etc sites on a range of hardware unless you happen to work for someone with deep pockets and a dedication to broad support (e.g. Google).
Is there a cost effective way to do so? Other than just getting a RaspberryPi and seeing if that can render it?
I do a lot of testing to support web apps in IE variants using a VM... I generally assume that this would be possible for testing lower performing machines as well.
Also, I do some testing for android and iOS browsers in xcode and the android sdk, (I have an actual iPhone and android tablet, too).
It's not hard or expensive, it just takes a whole lot of time, especially when you're trying to actually fix bugs.
There's a good reason they aren't targeting the high end: they can't.
A significant proportion of the weight behind non-web based UI comes from the need to efficiently leverage the GPU. You can almost get away without this on low res screens, but at 720p and beyond you need it as the sheer number of pixels starts to kill you.
Google have thrown massive amounts of effort into making Chrome look like it's almost there, but the reality is the layout model doesn't map to well performing GPU primitives nearly as well as, say, Cocoa. Mozilla haven't been able to get even a fraction of a distance down this path.
For this reason they'd have been better off chasing something like e-readers, since there the update speed isn't a big deal. But don't let anything like reason, logic or technical competence get in the way of Mozilla's decision making.
Your argument goes against my experience with Firefox for Android on my higher-than-720p Nexus 7. If it's slower than Chrome, I can barely notice; it's definitively not "a fraction of a distance down the path".
If you're enjoying Firefox for Android can I persuade you to try Firefox Aurora for Android. Even though I am using Nightly on my Android, I don't recommend going with the emotions of a nightly build. I am asking you to try Aurora because its a bit ahead of the normal release and IMHO performs even better. :-)
But as a developer, a lot of my disposable income is going to be directed towards gadgets and a $33 phone is just a decade behind the types of phones I would actually use myself.
I think that to attract developers, Mozilla should aim to find a partner that will ship a current-generation phone with Firefox OS. Asking people to install it themselves on a Galaxy based on a slightly screwed-up wiki page isn't exactly what I want for my personal every-minute-of-the-day phone.