[naitbit]

Are web technologies on the phone really the best way to empower users? Sure Firefox and Linux are open source(and I love them for that), but what about online apps? User does not have any control over the web page. If web page changes or disappears he can do nothing(and it can happen with no warning). Storing local copy of webpage may not be possible(because huge part of app may be on server side). Even proprietary desktop apps are better[1] because they do not change on each startup and you could always try to reverse engineer them. Web app also can store user data on server giving him no way to recover and it gives more spoofing opportunities. Sure we can try to teach users about to choose open source web pages, or pages that can work in offline mode, but unfortunately most web pages does not fit these categories.

I'm impressed by what Firefox OS managed to achieve using web technologies, but I posted this as a warning that users may chain themselves to some proprietary webapp even stronger than to native one. Hopefully Firefox Os will force more webapps to provide offline mode.

[1] Of course DRM tries to take away this advantage from desktop apps.