The situation on background 'services' is not ideal that's true but it's not as bad as you paint it. Since v1.0 it's possible to wake up an app with the alarm a

The situation on background 'services' is not ideal that's true but it's not as bad as you paint it. Since v1.0 it's possible to wake up an app with the alarm api and let it run whatever it needs to. This is used eg. by the calendar app for periodic synchronization. The future is Service Workers, and support should be there in gecko by the end of the year. Note that anyway, you should always design your service as something that can be shutdown by the OS if it needs to allocate resources somewhere else.