The problem is that Microsoft inversely gains from improving the ease of browser development. The easier it becomes to develop software using open source tools(

The problem is that Microsoft inversely gains from improving the ease of browser development. The easier it becomes to develop software using open source tools(No Visual studios) on an OS-independent platform(The web with browsers) the less money they make. Google's recent project (Native Client) is what I've been waiting for as a C++ developer. It basically allows you to run native code(assembler) in browser. But then has security mechanism so that the code cannot do anything to the client computer unless the user of that client has given the container(Sandbox) that runs the code permission. This will allow people to build their own UI frameworks, that render much more rich graphics and hopefully behave the same no matter what Browser/OS combination you are running on. References: Announcement: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/12/native-client-technology-for-running.html http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/12/native-clien... Native client code base hosted at Google code: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ Ars Technica review: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081209-safer-than-activex-a-look-at-googles-native-client-plugin.html http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081209-safer-than-act... Do people really think we'll ever reach a point where different vendors building code-bases based on documentation built by a committee will ever behave even remotely the same? Have you read any of the W3C documentation, it's fucking ridiculous. We should be sharing implementations, it's the only way to ensure bit-level identical behavior of a target system(Performance characteristics aside). I really hope Native Client takes off. In combination with Gears for client side storage it would allow us to build desktop quality software but with the web advantages of cross platform development, zero install applications(well as long as you don't consider caching a form of installing), user's pulling down the latest client at all times, and etc. Awaiting our new Google overlords. Endergen