[mook]

> 1) No one outside of Mozilla adopted XUL/XPCOM/JS as an application platform.

As somebody who worked on things that adopted the platform and shipped commercial products (see Songbird): Mozilla didn't and doesn't want to be a platform. Or rather, they wanted to be a platform when they started, but didn't want to do work like look at bugs that didn't affect Firefox. They did take the smaller patches, but there was never any chance of bigger changes landing. They never got away from the Netscape legacy; there were very few super-reviewers over the years that never worked for Netscape/Mozilla because OMG can't let people you have no control over delay shipping Netscape/Firefox.

The actual developers were all nice and mostly time-constrained. People I interacted with were great. But organizationally, the platform always played second fiddle to the browser.