Well, whaddya know, Dave Winer gets it: "we are right now stuffed in their locked trunk, the damned Web browser, although we're mostly in denial on it". P2P means doing interesting things on the desktop, again. Radio is interesting (and uses the browser for UI). Dave says of Groove "I think they made a mistake by not building their whole user interface in HTML" - I'm guessing that one reason is that ol' locked trunk there.

Actually, the Microsoft browser's not bad; at long last it supports the standards pretty well; CSS is clunky but it's a good standard (better in many ways than HTML, but not as good as XML). It's not so much a locked trunk, as a slippery slope. When we were building a big medical system at Agora a couple of years ago, we had to make the decision of which browser to support just so we could get the work done; but, having gone IE, the IE5 (non-standard) "behaviours" appeared and looked really compelling (and they are); there's more of the same in 5.5 and IE6. Embrace and extend. Of course, Microsoft do that very well indeed.

So, some of the Groove UI is HTML (Pinboard, for example, and I guess a lot more in future). It's just so flexible. But the browser's a layout engine, and a client to some servers, but it's not the OS. The browser needs to be embraced and - hey. Extended.