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Fennec is not the core of FirefoxOS, no. Gecko is the core of both, but Fennec provides an Android UI. Fennec's requirements are more tied to what the underlying Android version supports.

FirefoxOS is in fact working on requiring even less memory - there is a project underway to support devices with 128MiB: https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/Tarako

Underlying Firefox OS is B2G/boot-to-Gecko. That doesn't include any of the Android app stuff that's in Fennec.

Ok, I misunderstood the architecture. I thought Fennec was a retargetable 'mobile Firefox' core as opposed to Firefox for Android.

The new developer phones have an option to pretend you have 256, so they're probably supporting that. The linked bug is Firefox on Android, where it has to share with everything else Android's doing.