Stopwatch measurements of page loads? Back in the day, that's how we did it (uphill in the snow).

You act like google and mozilla are competitors. They're not. There's nothing mozilla does that competes with google. Both are working towards a larger and more capable web, and google has bet the farm on that web becoming the de-facto application platform. Mozilla's activities are a benefit to google, not a risk.

In essence, google is getting a very cheap deal with mozilla, and they know it (which is why the contract has been extended twice so far, and will likely be so again in the second half of 2011).

Competing browsers advance the state of the web art faster than a single dominant player. Google entered the browser market not to win, but to increase competition. Mozilla has much the same goal (firefox is the reason microsoft restarted IE development). There's no denying that the competition in the browser space is fierce and that this is leading to rapid iterations of these browsers.

No, Glenn Beck is to entertainment what McDonalds is to nutrition.

That's nonsense. I was bullied heavily as a child, but I'm not insecure anymore. Every victim has the choice to overcome the lack of confidence that being victimized gave them. We should stop treating victims like victims. Send them to karate class! Make them talk to large audiences! Why do we correct only the behavior of the bully when the behavior of the victim is just as much at fault?

You might argue that webkit doesn't need HTML anymore either (except for the canvas tag). Canvas and javascript can render anything, like the bespin web-based code editor, which uses only canvas.

Canvas and SVG serve very different purposes.

A few years back I had to port an "ellipse segment" drawing command to a set of quadratic curves because that was all that actionscript supported and the segment was part of a longer path that had to be rendered as a whole path (filled). It took me quite a while to get the hang of it, and I documented the crap out of that code to never forget how it worked. But yes, the resulting code just chops everything up into smaller ellipse segments until they get small enough to turn into a quadratic arc.

I wrote an actionscript app 5 years ago that rendered SVG to screen using flash's drawing API, which looks a lot like canvas. None of this stuff is particularly novel, but then open standards aren't supposed to innovate, they're supposed to standardize the best practices.

I disagree.

SVG, Flash and HTML don't have a meaningful difference when it comes to their abilities or structure. All three are hierarchies of content nodes, changeable via dynamic scripting. That HTML and SVG use text to demarcate the nodes and flash uses binary blobs is of no consequence, because parsers don't care whether the symbols are text or binary. The fact that HTML is easier to index than flash is not due to any inherent quality of the technology, it's due to the fact that HTML is used for static content and flash is used for dynamic content. Gmail is made in HTML, but it's not indexable (and thankfully so!). It remains to be seen whether SVG's usage will be more static than flash. Quite possibly SVG could end up being just as difficult to index as flash.

I also don't quite agree that staticness can be determined by the absence of dynamic scripting. I think with svg filters and css styles you can do an awful lot of dynamic behavior that isn't actually scripted, similar to the pure-css popup menus that we've seen in HTML.

I think perhaps they get to play too much. The problem with modern society is overstimulation. Creative thinking requires looking inwards. You have to get into a state of flow and delve into your own mind for divergent solutions. As long as there's a never-ending stream of external stimuli, it's very difficult for genuine creative thinking to occur.

I find that I'm most creative when I put down the books, games, computer and everything else, and just sit somewhere quietly and think.

You do realize that flash internally manages a display object hierarchy not unlike the DOM? There isn't much difference between writing apps in flex/flash and writing apps in javascript with something like ExtJS toolkit. All rich app frameworks I know, on any platform, use the HTML-like approach of having an element hierarchy and a set of layout rules that are constantly re-calculated.

HTML may be ill-suited to rich app development, but so is everything else. Win32 and X11 are both truly horrible API's, arguably much worse than HTML+JS+CSS, but combined they hold the majority share of native apps.

And by the way, the browsers of today are designed for rich applications. They have been for a few years now. Cars were originally designed to make it up to a brisk walking pace at best. Things change.

JavaScript is not the problem for blind users, there is WAI-ARIA for that. The newest crop of screen readers can deal just fine with Ajax sites, provided they're wired correctly.

Also, I think the leap from the lightest mobile device to the heaviest desktop user is too big. You have to split your UI into a few key segments and optimize each. If you try to make a single UI fit all purposes, you end up fitting no purpose exactly right, and spend a lot more effort than when building a few dedicated UI's.

As long as you have to pay for mobileme, it doesn't really matter. One of apple's biggest blunders is not considering mobileme a loss leader.

ActiveX is a plugin API, the other guys all had one (netscape had NPAPI). What people blame microsoft for is ActiveX actually being successful, not the concept of browser plugins. ActiveX was used in apps to do stuff you couldn't do in HTML (and still can't do). Why not hold microsoft accountable for the stuff they did that was actually out of the ordinary? The main thing microsoft did wrong was not the development of proprietary features, but rather the complete lack of development between 2001 and 2006.

Saying "Microsoft is standards compliant THIS time" is just too much to swallow.

Cognitive dissonance hurts, but IE9 really is supporting standards well, focusing on open API's, and abandoning proprietary extensions. In IE7, 8 and now 9 they've gradually been disabling proprietary API's, and IE9 in IE9 mode will only have vendor extensions that follow the best practices we've come to expect from all the browser makers (vendor-specific name space, implementing features based on published draft specs).