I assume you're referring to Lars Bak, who founded the original Dart team. Dart is likely used by three orders of magnitude more developers since those days. He built a great language foundation, but adoption came later, as it tends to given how ecosystems develop. Flutter has 100,000 apps in the store, all built with Dart, and GitHub's last survey showed that Dart is the single fastest growing language: https://octoverse.github.com/#... so I suspect this premise doesn't stand up to close scrutiny.

For what it's worth, you can write native Win32. This isn't "webby spy on you crap" (unless you write web-based spyware with it :)

In case you're interested in finding out more, there's a whole series of examples here for you to play with: https://medium.com/@timsneath/...

[Disclosure: I'm a member of the Flutter team]

Hi there, thank you for the post. I just wanted to add a few observations on behalf of the Internet Explorer team.

Firstly, no browser offers a perfect implementation of the Canvas 2D API specification to date - we've documented and shared a few examples from our test suites here: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/#html5Canvas

As has been well noted, the IE9 build tested was our beta.

Secondly, in response to the specific issues raised, Giorgio Sardo has posted a response on his blog here:
      http://blogs.msdn.com/b/giorgio/archive/2011/01/14/building-great-browsers-together.aspx

We'll update this entry over time.

Thanks for listening,

Tim Sneath | Microsoft Corp.

Hi, we've posted an official response and explanation at the bottom of this post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/11/17/html5-and-real-world-site-performance-seventh-ie9-platform-preview-available-for-developers.aspx

Bottom line - we built an optimizing compiler into the Chakra JavaScript engine that eliminates dead code where it finds it.

It's a fun conspiracy theory that we'd somehow 'game' SunSpider in this way, but it doesn't make sense that we'd go to all that risk to cheat on just one test out of 26.

Best wishes, Tim Sneath | Microsoft

Hi there, I work for the client platform team here at Microsoft and thought I'd take this opportunity to quickly answer the valid questions you raise.

Firstly, we're not trying to hide anything in terms of developer APIs or documentation. We've got a good set of reference material online that is targeted at someone developing Silverlight content for display on a website. On the other hand, Moonlight is developing a compatible implementation of the Silverlight runtime, which is a pretty specialist requirement. There are different needs that Miguel and team have - for example, how to parse ill-formed content, and there are internal development specs that will help in making a 100% compatible implementation.

Secondly, the codecs themselves are licensed implementations of the VC-1 standard. We're not in a position to put them into the public domain, unfortunately, but making binaries available at least exposes the functionality.

Hope this explains where we're coming from and dispels at least in part the perception that every strategic move has evil intent!