The argument about ECMAScript 4 (the proposed next iteration of Javascript) could very well become quite interesting, although, realistically, this probably won’t be happening for a few years.

Mozilla wants to overhaul the language. Microsoft’s main goal is to preserve the status quo.

While I hate Microsoft a lot, their approach is probably more practical: keep backward compatibility intact, and if you want new features, deploy an entirely new language. Javascript++, perhaps. (Or ECMAScript++, to be exact.)

Either way, Mozilla will have the advantage.

Since the creation of the next-generation language will be governed by ECMA, it will by necessity be an open standard.

Given what I know about how fast Open Source projects can develop (when the effort is put into it), and given what we all know about Microsoft’s glacial development process (think how long it took to release Vista, or how Internet Explorer 7 still doesn’t support CSS 2.1), I would bet rather confidently that Mozilla will have Javascript 4 support long before IE ever does.

This scarcely matters, though, unless Javascript 4 has some features that are impossible or at least difficult to implement with the current version of Javascript.

But the asymmetry between Mozilla and Microsoft is what makes it interesting. Mozilla Firefox is available on pretty much every modern platform out there (specifically, Windows and UNIX/UNIX-like variants, where the latter includes Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Solaris, and AIX. There are even ports for BeOS, RISC OS, and OS/2.) Meanwhile, IE is only available for Windows. While there are far more personal computers running Windows than all the other OSes combined, the big difference is that you have to pay for IE (since it only comes with Windows) while Firefox is completely free.

So if someone builds a killer webapp that requires Javascript 4, and only Firefox supports Javascript 4, there is really no barrier to using the webapp. Just download Firefox and away you go. Even if you are running Windows.

In contrast, webapp developers can’t really get away with supporting only IE. The market share of other OSes has been steadily increasing. While Mac OS X has much of the media’s attention, clearly Linux continues to be a player. Despite the recent brouhaha about Linux losing market share to Windows, even the most pessimistic estimates seem to peg Linux at at least 0.81%, which sounds pathetic until you consider that in 2000, it was estimated that there were more than 168 million computers in use just in the U.S., meaning that there are at the very least 1.3 million computers running Linux.

This means at least a million computers that can’t run IE, and I think the result is that most web developers have been forced to properly support open standards, specifically XHTML 1 and CSS 2.

In any case, very few people really developed only for IE anyway. For one thing, it took a long time for Netscape 4 to finally die. There are anecdotes of people still using the thing well into the new millenium. For another thing, Active X became a fiasco because of the Microsoft’s inability to build a platform that has at least rudimentary security. The news of IE’s vulnerabilities to viruses and trojans was broadcast even by the mainstream media, and many people started avoiding IE like the plague. If Active X hadn’t been hijacked by malware producers, Web 2.0 might’ve come much earlier (although it would’ve solidified Microsoft’s dominance and would’ve been extremely harmful to the Open Source Movement.)

When Microsoft discontinued IE for Mac, and when Safari came out, I think that pretty much spelled the end of vendor lock-in with regards to the Web¹. Mac users would certainly not put up with their favorite on-line store’s lack of support for their computer, and you’ve got to consider the fact that the average Mac user has money to spend. Don’t support Safari? It’s quite easy to switch to another company.

So if Firefox decides to start supporting Javascript 4, Microsoft won’t really be able to complain about anti-competitive behavior. For one thing, the standard is easily available on the Internet and if Microsoft wasn’t a monolithic behemoth, they’d be able to implement it before the decade was out. For another thing, the Mozilla Foundation isn’t making billions of dollars off of Firefox and would likely be very hard to prosecute under anti-trust laws.

And if Javascript 4 (or some even more featureful descendant of it) is what the Web needs to secure its place as the platform for application development, you better believe it’s going to happen. The road to the Vingeian singularity runs through the Web, and on to through ubiquitous computing. None of this will work at all without open, robust standards for intercommunicating, and Microsoft is certainly not going to be the company with the vision to take us where we want to go.