He's leading Mozilla's development of the Firefox browser with the expectation that developers need the next round of Web technology to offer better offline support, improved vector graphics and more powerful programming languages. He, too, sees a future in mashups and online video.

Plug-ins and frameworks shield developers from the implementation detail so they can focus on building the application. Yet, plug-ins hold their own set of problems: How much code will users download? Will they eventually conflict with one another? Schroepfer isn't too worried. "They're a really important vector for getting functionality into the browser," he says. He also points out that historically, there have always been ways to add "mini functionality" to the browser, and often those were proprietary solutions. "But it doesn't have to be "antagonistic to open standards," he says.

All the technology advances mentioned in other portions of this article package, such as the merging of Web and desktop client and tool evolution, are important to the browser vendors. "It's easy to say, 'I want it to work offline,'" points out Hachamovitch. "Sure, we can put in things to put into browsers and frameworks to make it possible to persist offline. But the larger, harder challenge" is making the software know what to do. Does the person writing the app do all that intelligence on both the client and the server—in ASP or Perl or whatever? "Yes, we provided the tech capability to store data offline," he says, but it leaves a lot of hard work for the developer to connect those dots and to answer difficult questions. Do I need to set policy? As an end user, do I want to do that? Should a Web application be able to share bank info with Facebook? "That's why we're engaging with the community of developers the way we are," says Hachamovitch.

Developers should be part of the discussion. "Developers need to participate in the evolution of their platform proactively," Schroepfer says. They can participate in helping the process, he says, and they have an important stake in doing so.

Next: Back to the beginning, Beyond Ajax: Software Development, Two Years from Now