I think they will co-exist as separate languages for separate problem-solving approaches. Go has first class support for channels and duck-type interfaces, for starters.
Also, nothing on Firefox OS would stop developers from using any payment processor they wish to. It's all just web technology running on a mobile device so there are many payment providers to choose from, especially for US and European users.
Actually you can [theoretically] put a charge on your phone bill from desktop but there are some open bugs around this and it's not a high priority use case for us. The main case for desktop is credit card processing.
The main reason Mozilla built a payments service and offered a custom library for developers vs. recommending Stripe (etc.) is because no one supported the direct operator billing we needed in our Firefox OS launch countries with a developer friendly interface.
No commercial Firefox OS devices are shipping in any English speaking country. It looks like you're finding community blog posts probably clustered around launch countries. Anyway, press releases are always announced in English here: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/category/press-releases/
I'll admit I'm somewhat conflicted. You can arrive at similar conclusions thinking about it as child pornography. In both cases it does seem like censoring the material is the right thing to do.
However, my conflict comes from the fact that censorship doesn't really solve the root problem. In child molesters, the problem is better treated in psychiatric care and in extremism the problem is better treated through education, peace, and tolerance.
It won't be integrated into Android very well though; you can't kill the process, you can't check its resources, it's not in the task switcher, etc, etc
If you build an app with Cordova you can easily get stuck in their APIs. If you build a Firefox OS web app you get stuck in Mozilla's APIs :) BUT Mozilla is making a strong effort at standardization and is working with Chrome and others to reach consensus. Cordova strays farther away from stable HTML5 APIs than Mozilla does so in Firefox OS you will definitely be building a more webby app. I.E. some HTML5 APIs work great on mobile, no reason to use a custom Cordova one in many cases.
However, if you need rich cross platform support for your app (like iOS) I'd still suggest going with Cordova. There is a Firefox OS backend! https://github.com/apache/cordova-firefoxos
Yeah, a lot of web APIs have implementations that connect directly to the Android equivalent. When writing a web app you'd always use a "web" API though. Some of those APIs are still very new and Chrome and Mozilla haven't reached consensus yet so you'd have to deal with prefixing and what not.
"The fallout from the Snowden leaks have hurt U.S. technology firms' ability to sell their products overseas"
What an idiotic, capitalistic claim. So Andreeson calls him a traitor because "business is now harder." Huh? Nevermind invasion of privacy and injustice.
"The decision compromises important principles in order to alleviate misguided fears about loss of browser marketshare"
misguided, as in, Firefox wants people to actually use its browser? I'm seriously surprised at some of these idealists failing to understand that normal people just want to watch House of Cards (or whatever) and that's pretty much it. Mozilla can't turn their back on those users.
There are many things wrong with this article. You can't hash secrets like this because hash functions are iterative. You should be using HMAC. Here's a good explanation http://benlog.com/2008/06/19/dont-hash-secrets/
I had to make this exact same decision in 2001 and I chose PHP!
I subsequently fell in love with Python and am still active with it today. I think a choice as far back as 2001 doesn't matter too much, programming is programming. However, I feel like I became a better programmer by having to deal with a language as shitty as PHP. There were so many pitfalls that I quickly became an expert at working around them -- this took a lot of painstaking investigation into the inner workings of the language.
Dammit. After posting, I caught up with the feed of clips and just bought six records :( It turns up records like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCC0wgVXNpc Wat??