It's not just about ideology and PR... it's about keeping our users secure. And the "ideology" has a very pragmatic side: it's about keeping the web based on a

It's not just about ideology and PR... it's about keeping our users secure. And the "ideology" has a very pragmatic side: it's about keeping the web based on actual standards that can evolve rather than defacto standards that we will have to live with forever. We're dealing with this on the Mozilla Mobile team because of touch events. There is no standard for touch events in browsers. Mobile Safari and Android both implement touch events, and their implementations are partly compatible and partly incompatible. Mobile Firefox could choose to take one of those implementations and copy it. In the short term it would make us more compatible with some existing iPhone-optimized sites. But in the long run it would raise the barrier for getting web sites (and browser vendors) to switch to an actual standardized API. So we're going to try to get the WHATWG to agree on a standard for touch events before we implement them rather than after. The standards process is not just about ideology - it often catches significant design and security flaws, as it has with WebSockets. It's much harder to change an API once you've shipped it to a userbase like Mozilla's (hundreds of millions of people - around 30% of all internet users). Remember the story about Stuart Feldman when he was asked to make the Makefile syntax more sensible? He said he couldn't, because there were already over a dozen people using it.