At the recently held O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference, representatives from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera reached a consensus: they would no longer engage in "life-or-death" battles over web browsers. At the conference, the representatives of these three companies stated that they would stop trying to outdo each other by aggressively adding new features to their browsers. Instead, they hoped to transform the browser into a Web platform to welcome the next generation of rich Internet applications.
There is no doubt that using the browser as a Web application platform presents many challenges. Brendan Eich, Mozilla's chief architect, said that there is still much work to be done to ensure JavaScript-based applications run flawlessly. Eich noted: "Using JavaScript in its current form is difficult to achieve in a browser. If an application fails within the browser, it can cause trouble and easily become a security vulnerability."
Chris Wilson, the platform architect for Microsoft’s IE7, said: "The safest system is one where nothing is inserted, including various functions."
Originally reposted from Huo Hu (Fire Fox): http://www.52huohu.org