[mwcampbell]

I will now relent of defending Mozilla, in which I have zero vested interest. Mozilla's mission and approach seem good on paper (or in HTML), but you make good points.

It seems to me, on reflection, that I have been playing the role of religious apologist, while you have been the skeptic. This is ironic, because I have been in the opposite sitaution with regard to my former real religion for the past couple of years.

It seems to me that Android is the closest thing we have to a non-proprietary application platform, and even that is more tightly controlled by one company than we might like.

For now, I guess the best approach to writing great apps is to write the UI-independent core in a reasonable cross-platform language, and then use each platform's native UI constructs. iOS makes this difficult for any language higher-level than Objective-C, since there can be no JIT compilation for iOS. But I'm thinking now that C# might be a reasonable cross-platform language, given Xamarin's work on Mono for mobile platforms.