They lost it. WebM is officially patent-encumbered. So, license or no, it's non-Free. Making it no better than MPEG now that MPEG is basically under the same license. Plus, unlike WebM, MPEG has widespread hardware acceleration on mobile devices, making WebM basically DOA. I was a fan of WebM and thought it could supplant MPEG on mobile. Mozilla did, too, which is why they took the stance of supporting WebM but not MPEG. Google, however, supported MPEG for commercial reasons, so WebM never had a chance.

WebP isn't used by Firefox yet and won't be used by IE or Safari anytime soon, making it useless for most sites. It's handy for some mobile apps. I know Facebook uses it in their mobile apps. But it's pretty useless on the open web due to lack of widespread support.

I will give you SPDY's small latency improvements, of course. As well as WebSockets now that it isn't horrendously broken and insecure anymore. WebRTC is quite cool and will hopefully achieve wider support.

Chrome's apps are definitively not the same as Firefox extensions. Chrome's extensions are the same as Firefox's extensions. Chrome's apps are a proprietary grab at the desktop and keeping people locked into Chrome instead of being able to use open web apps in a browser of their choice. This is by design and not exactly a secret.

Chrome's UI was simply evolutionary, not revolutionary and is the direction things were already headed in. Take a look at Opera 9.5 released the year before Chrome existed. Tabs up top. Forward/back to the left of the URL bar. Chrome evolved having the menu bar hidden by default and simplifying the visual controls a bit. But it didn't completely change what was already occurring in other browsers. Firefox took more note of Chrome than Opera because Chrome started stealing market share.

Mozilla/Netscape has put more man-hours into the open web than Google. Google doesn't 'sponsor' Mozilla. Google pays Mozilla for a service that nets Google far more money than they give Mozilla. It isn't just about money thrown at things, it's about actual hours and results. The majority of Mozilla's man-hours being unpaid doesn't mean they don't count, despite your insistence on only measuring dollars.

And, as for the open web, Mozilla is the only one fighting for it on mobile via Firefox OS, which will use open web apps with additional open source connectors into local functionality (storage, camera, etc). This is an attempt to fight against the closed ecosystem of Apple and the partially closed ecosystem of Android's app store. You'll be able to 'install' web apps from any website without the need of an app store and without needing to side-load onto your phone.