I think the entire notion of rich user interaction in browser is a significant barrier.

No one will argue that with the exception of the most AJAXy websites (gmail, google maps, etc.) desktop user interface is far superior to web user interface.

CSS and HTML (maybe 5?) don't seem sufficient. That's why we've seen non-standard solutions emerge: Flash, silverlight, etc...

I tend to think the issue of rich web interface to rival desktop UI is a completely separate, but very relevant issue.

For the last few years Google's strategy has been to make the browser the platform of choice. That would make the whole Windows, Linux, Mac, mobile whatever choice irrelevant.

Making Firefox act more like a real operating system, each "application" runs in its own process is another step in that direction. It means that my gmail browser window won't crash if I surf to some buggy website. And it means that I can run a lot of browser based application faster and more stably.

This is the next logical step for people to start using Google word processor running in firefox instead of Word or OpenOffice. Once there's a stable browser based platform for browser applications to run in, a whole world of possibilities begins to opens up.

This seems like a silly argument.

Why would you not want to make a more robust browser? You have to first accept that the application will never be perfect, will always have *something* wrong. Then it's an easy decision to choose to build a robust browser which can fail elegantly and minimize the effects of flaws.

I believe we need better tools.

Right now, as others have noted, threading is hard and complex. Shared memory is tricky. In the shared memory threading model, one thread can modify data, while another thread is completely unaware that the data it is operating on has actually just changed! It's a very tricky model and can introduce all sorts of tricky, difficult to track bugs.

Separates processes are a lot simpler since each process has its own unshared memory. As of today, I don't believe there are enough tools to make managing concurrency simple.

People on slashdot (and elsewhere) keep on saying "a lot of programs won't benefit because they're sequential". Most program execution time is spent inside loops: do work on one thing then do work on the next thing. These can be run in parallel very easily. All we need are the right tools to make it simple.

We're starting to build the necessary tools. They're not there yet to make concurrency a "no thought necessary" free lunch. But, look at the tools that have already emerged (and are still quite young): the entire functional programming-inspired stack map/reduce etc, CUDA, and languages like Erlang and Haskell, etc...
A few years ago when I was looking for Python libraries to do concurrent programming it was quite difficult. Now the multiprocessing module is in the standard library of Python 2.6; that is a major step forward that makes multicore processing significantly simpler.

I think that big, high profile projects like this will encourage the necessary innovation to develop those tools: necessity is the mother of invention. When big open source projects hit new problem requiring new tools the broader community tends to benefit.

I use Ubuntu Intrepid on all my machines now.
The only thing I go into windows for anymore is excel and a browser with java pluging (the 64 bit plugin for firefox doesn't come in Intrepid repositories and is a pain to install).
Occasionally, I've run into weird web things that need IE or need something else weird for a presentation. Maybe WebEx or something. But in general, I have very few issues where I need windows. I have the windows virtual machine setup in case I need it. But it's very rare.

Have you tried WINE for specific applications? I needed good notetaking software and evernote seems to be running great with WINE.

I might try out Excel on WINE next.

We have much more complex ballots in the United States than elsewhere.

In Canada, voters only have 1 decision: their representative for parliament.

In the United States, ballots can have, literally, dozens of choices. Presidential, senate, house of representatives, propositions, and various local elected officials. All of which adds up to dozens of options.

Hand counting so many options would be much more complex than in a country like Canada.

Zestyping (see grandparent) described this in his dissertation: http://zestyping.livejournal.com/234617.html.

Daniel