Agreed, IndexedDB delayed the mobile web for 4-5 years.
Mozilla should have just shipped SQLite early and focused of proper file APIs and threading so developers can use any database that can be written in javascript. It turns out that specifying a database API takes years, having people agree on it and implementing it takes some more.
Even today, as IndexedDB is implemented by all browsers, both Firefox and Safari have a quick and dirty implementation written on top of SQLite, giving us less performance on a reduced API. Chrome has LevelDB (which is awesome!) on the backend but the result isn't much faster in my experience. IE I don't remember.
Mozilla should have just shipped SQLite early and focused of proper file APIs and threading so developers can use any database that can be written in javascript. It turns out that specifying a database API takes years, having people agree on it and implementing it takes some more.
Even today, as IndexedDB is implemented by all browsers, both Firefox and Safari have a quick and dirty implementation written on top of SQLite, giving us less performance on a reduced API. Chrome has LevelDB (which is awesome!) on the backend but the result isn't much faster in my experience. IE I don't remember.