FTA: “[It] is because of Firefox and other open-source projects like Apache and Linux that the web, smartphones, and the technology sector in general are so healthy. 15 years ago, as IE6 and Nutscrape fought over various non-standard implementations of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, no one would’ve predicted that today there would be standard implementations of all three.”

I object. Mozilla Firefox 1 came out in November of 2004. Apple Safari 1 came out in June of 2003. By then, WebKit had already been around for several years. In mobile, Mozilla's browsers play little to no role, nearly all mobile platforms use WebKit. In 2007, Mobile Safari was the first decent mobile web browser. It's silly to credit Mozilla with the advances of the mobile web.

“10 years ago, [...] no one would’ve guessed that today you could write a full-blown program with open web technologies and have it run equally well on dozens of different software platforms.”

Let's be honest, that's still not really the case. In the US, 40% of web usage comes from IE. About half of that comes from IE version 8 or lower [1]. I wouldn't say that full-blown web apps run as well in IE8.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-US-monthly-201106-201206