I think the "corporations are evil" meme among hippies has something to do with one or more of these:

• A. Corporate executives are seldom held liable for their actions through the corporation thanks to limited liability.
• B. More "evil" corporations tend to be under a for-profit charter as opposed to a not-for-profit charter that requires all earnings to be reinvested in growth. Mozilla Corporation is technically for-profit, but it's wholly owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.
• C. There's a perception that for-profit corporations, especially publicly traded ones, have some sort of "fiduciary duty" to compromise what marketing convinces the public are the corporation's founding principles in the name of maximizing profit. This puts them the farthest toward evil alignment, specifically lawful evil pre-4e.

Now which is it?

Mozilla Corporation is a corporation. I don't see what that changes.

Except that Apple has the right to (and will likely) choose not to implement the proposed W3C photography API in Safari, just as it chose not to implement WebGL, to encourage developers to buy a Mac and pay the $99 + 30%. Apple has the power to prevent the technology from becoming mainstream.

Go to caniuse.com and find a feature that would prove useful to a particular web application. For example, look up camera and microphone access or 3D graphics. As long as a widely used browser (such as IE one version back or Safari for iOS) shows a red box for this feature, you have to build the application separately for each platform in order to avoid loss of business when users get an error message that a particular browser feature is absent.

To make a web application, you can own any brand of computer. To make a native application for OS X or iOS, you have to own a Mac in addition to whatever computer you might happen to already own. And I can cite statistics that there's over a 90% chance that this computer that you already own happens not to be a Mac.

With WebGL disabled in Safari for iOS, good luck replacing every good native game with a good web application. And good luck being able to use a device's camera to take a picture in a web application.

In your opinion, should one have to download and install a program to take photographs and upload? Say you want to deposit a check. You can ride the bus to an ATM, ride the bus to a branch, ride the bus to the post office and mail it to the bank, or take a photo of the front and back of the check and upload the photos to the bank. Guess which of these is the easiest to do if your bank is in another state. Banks tend to require a native application for this because support in mobile browsers for photography is lacking.

In your opinion, should one have to download and install a program to play a video game that isn't turn-based? Safari for iOS doesn't allow web applications to display 3D graphics.

Why should such boiling down be shameful? Fully dynamically typed languages impose substantial runtime overhead and require manual creation of even those test cases that would be implicit in a language that has even an option for static typing.

A bookmark of a web application is an icon.

Access to input and output components like camera, joystick, and 3D graphics is not guaranteed in a browser. Apple, for example, refuses to open WebGL to anything but iAds. Winner, native.

For one thing, this applies only if your web application uses a "page" model, not an AJAX model. For another, most of a web application should stay cached for weeks on end.

The same thing can happen if your native application's version control server or backup server gets hacked.

If iTunes isn't real money, then why is PayPal real money?

Web applications can include an offline version using application manifests, IndexedDB, and an IndexedDB-compatible shim around the SQLite included in WebKit. Native applications can display an alert box and close if they fail to connect to the Internet service to which they were designed to connect. For example, good luck using the Facebook or Twitter application offline. Advantage neither.

The court can just subpoena the server used by the native application's remote backup feature.

Stripe, Authorize.Net, PayPal, and Dwolla charge transaction fees. Apple, Google, Microsoft, OUYA, and the like charge bigger transaction fees.

Then let me translate #44584359:

Sorry, but the X11/Linux stack seen in Linux distributions still sucks for gaming, no other way to put it. Not only do most of the new games still ONLY come out on Windows, but you would have to flush most of your existing collection down the crapper, as Wine still only runs about 2 out of 5 games. I own a few hundred PC games; most of them are non-functional in Wine and the few that work are very quirky and behave oddly.

The only thing i like about X11/Linux is the Xfce desktop (makes the Windows desktop look obsolete). Other desktop environments for X11 seem to be getting as slow as Windows these days and otherwise more or less behave like Windows. Now whether that's Windows trying to act like X11 DEs or X11 DEs trying to act like Windows I don't know.

I agree, if money is no object. But a lot of people can afford either a gaming PC or a console. So they have to choose either the thing that does "console" things best or the thing that does "PC gaming" things best, not both.

On the other hand, certain console games just don't work in a PC setup yet. For a fighting game or a cooperative platformer, sure you can plug four Xbox 360 controllers or HID joysticks into a USB hub, but it's hard to gather four people around one desktop or laptop monitor. Steam's Big Picture Mode is a step toward that, but Valve doesn't yet have an affordable, attractive, pre-made box designed to sit next to a TV. Come December, it'll be Xbox One, Steam box zero.