Until the parties punish those who fund the opposition, forcing single-party donations (which they'll never do)

Well, not anymore, apparently.

...problem is that many large companies have internal systems that were written back when Microsoft pushed ActiveX as the solution...

Actually, if these companies had written their internal system software as a big ActiveX component, they wouldn't have this problem. ActiveX is (as far as IE's concerned) simply a plugin architecture. Note that the Flash plugin for IE (an ActiveX control) works the same in IE6-IE8.

The problem with ActiveX is that it's just not an appropriate plugin technology for browsers. It has no inherent sandboxing capabilities; there's no way to differentiate between a browser plugin and any other ActiveX control; and Windows comes with several ActiveX controls that should never be allowed to be used in a browser (FileSystemObject, anyone)? For what it was designed for -- resuable components for desktop applications -- it's great, but MS should have put a little more thought into what they were unleashing when they decided to make ActiveX the plugin standard for IE. And no, I don't count "signed" and "marked safe for scripting" features as thought.

No, the problem is that these business systems were all put together using HTML/CSS content that was only ever written for, or tested with, IE. Companies that needed these systems took their bizapps people and told 'em to "make a web version". As is typical with internal apps, they were written to meet the company's needs as quickly and cheaply as possible; which means "works in our current environment", not "is ready for the future". Add in years of ad-hoc tweaks, changes, subsystem additions, and you've got a crufty piece of web tech that barely works in the originally spec'ed envrionment.

Asking for cross-browser/web standards output from a bunch of stuff written by programmers who:

• Are used to working with client-side/Winforms VB or C# .Net (or VB6) and SQL Server/MS Access databases for their bizapps
• Who may or may not be any good at their jobs
• Who may not be the same people who originally wrote the code
• Who were told to pick "fast and cheap" as the two out of three (fast, cheap, good)
• Who were told all of this 10 years ago

is optimistic, at best.

The link you referenced had no reference that I could see to 'objective

You were supposed to have noticed this part:

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built
[...]
the first Web browser (named WorldWideWeb
[...]
it could run only on the NeXT
[...]

And then remembered that the preferred language of the NeXT boxen is Objective-C.

Imagine if your healthcare was run like Amtrak or the DMV. What a nightmare that would be.

Actually, I like my DMV. Right down the street, extended hours of operation (including Saturdays), website for most things (and timely processing if you go through the mail), lots of friendly people, short wait times.

Compare this with my HMO. I can get in easily enough, but my doctors are so swamped trying to cover as many patients (and trying to make as much money) as possible that it's usually 30-40 minutes after the nurse checks my vitals before I actually see the doctor. My healthcare benefits are provided by my wife's employer, so my options are limited unless I want to spend a boatload more money. Sure, it's technically private, but for me, my healthcare is essentially provided by a monopoly.

Maybe instead of trying to tear things down, you could stand up and ask for the people in charge -- you know, the ones you elect -- to put *competent* folks in public service, rather than people they owe a favor to. "Heckuva job there, Brownie..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) Mosaic was on Macs at the end of 1993.

NCSA Mosaic was not a commercial browser. It was freeware (actually, I believe it was released as public domain software) from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. NCSA is at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, commonly known as UIUC. Check 'em out at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/