217 karma · joined January 22, 2014
Minor point: I strongly contest that Mozilla is a wasteful company - salaries are low by large-tech-firm standards and spending (on travel, equipment, etc.) is fairly frugal. I have never heard of employees having almost work to do - it is nearly always the opposite. Travel is nearly always for coordinated team work since many employees and volunteers work remotely. For a (relatively) small budget, Mozilla produce an awful lot of results - the entire company is run on vastly less than the marketing budget (!) for Chrome, for example (sorry, can't find a source though).
The problem is not with web technology, but with the implementation and use of web technology. Of course, since this is mostly out of the hands of app developers, this doesn't help much. But I think it is important to be blaming the right culprits.
(Hopefully we are not too far off bringing these optimisations to Firefox on Android at least, for now they exist only for Firefox OS).
If you are not getting HWA, you can try forcing it on by setting 'layers.acceleration.force-enabled' to true in about:config (I would do that in a throw away profile though because it might crash Firefox; that overrides the black list).
That hardware rendering is smoother is also not true in general, just some cases, which the browser will try to guess for you.