Mozilla is at it again. You can't blame it; the once-powerful open-source consortium is irrelevant in mobile, and the Mozilla crew are, after all, the good guys. Google may once have said "don't be evil," but Mozilla puts its nonprofit status where its mouth is: it is genuinely in the Web game for the public good, not for the Benjamins.
Mozilla's nonprofit, volunteer-oriented philosophy doesn't mesh well with the demands of mobile OEMs and carriers, though. And beyond the philosophical differences, Boot to Gecko is swimming against several major currents in mobile, it's entering a highly saturated mobile OS marketplace with much stronger players, and it's challenged by a really poor track record for open-source mobile projects. The main obstacles it faces:
A cloud-based OS is a carrier's nightmare. If you listen to the carriers, we're entering a world of spectrum and data scarcity, where ever-faster networks will be accompanied by strict data caps and companies that can conserve network data will win. (This is one of the few bright spots for RIM.) Boot to Gecko eschews native apps for HTML5, which is capable of doing local computing but tends to lead developers to rely more on network data than native apps do. That won't thrill wireless carriers.
Mozilla has no champion. Unless you're part of that brave minority of Android hacker-geeks, a mobile device's OS generally isn't a user-serviceable part. So an OS vendor must get its work preloaded, either by OEMs or by carriers. The manufacturers that don't have their own operating systems currently can choose between Android and Windows Phone 7, with HP's WebOS potentially on the horizon. All three of those operating systems have huge, powerful, organized companies pushing them. Those companies have strong relationships with OEMs and carriers, not to mention full-time marketing and partner relations departments with easy points of contact. Mozilla has few friends, and no champions, in the mobile world.
We need fewer, not more mobile OSes. Boot to Gecko neatly sidesteps the question of how to win over developers by focusing on HTML5; Web apps work on a variety of platforms. But manufacturers and carriers have both been complaining about needing to support many mobile OSes, wishing for a simpler ecosystem. Even with the decline of Symbian and potentially RIM, Mozilla will find it hard to sell yet another OS to manufacturers and carriers.
Mobile thin clients demand a world without network dead zones. We've been hearing this whole "it'll all be Web apps" story for years. Absolutely years. Remember the first iPhone? Apple decided "Web apps only" was a bad idea, in part because the Web apps dropped out every time AT&T lost a connection. Thin client computing tends to require fast, ubiquitous and nearly unlimited Internet connections (one of the reasons it works well in offices), and that won't be the case with wireless networks for several years, if ever.
Mozilla has a poor track record on mobile. Mozilla's primary mobile project is the former Fennec, now Firefox Mobile, which has been in an endless development cycle. Mozilla originally announced its mobile Firefox project in 2007, first focusing on the doomed Maemo and Windows Mobile platforms, then releasing nonfunctional alphas in 2009 and finally, by mid-2011, having a mediocre Android browser that we rated the lowest of four third-party Android Web browsers. If Boot to Gecko is released on this schedule, competitors have absolutely nothing to worry about.
My arguments mostly cover the world of handhelds, of course. Laptops are sold directly without carrier intervention, people are used to tinkering with the OS on laptops, laptops spend a lot more time in places with LANs, and open-source OSes have had a bit more success in laptops. Tablets fall in between laptops and mobile phones on the scale of this argument.
Never having pulled off a successful mobile project, Mozilla has a lot to prove with Boot to Gecko. The organization may yet succeed, but the odds are against it.