RIA and Mozilla
With Longhorn, Microsoft are busy building a richer environment for delivering applications to the desktop. In the meantime some in the non-Microsoft world have been busy pushing the concept of Rich Internet Applications. Two of these (Laszlo System's presentation server and Macromedia's Flex) leverage the ubiquity of Flash. But the gamble that Microsoft is taking is that you really need to extend the browser. Microsoft need to deploy XAML compliant browsers to support their approach. In the same time-frame couldn't an open-source browser like Mozilla be extended to make it the preferred target for advanced RIA? Afterall it already contains functionality that has no equivalent in IE (e.g. XUL). And just how long will it be before there are more XAML capable browsers than Mozilla?
I don't want to tread on anybody's definition of what a RIA is - or how they compare to what Microsoft is planning to do - so let me just be clear about what I would like to see from a