Web browsers and RIAs
With smart and good looking AJAX sites becoming more prevalent on the web . The only restriction for Ajax developers now is browser compatibility and when it comes to Internet Explorer 5 ,6 and 7 its has became a nightmare for Ajaxians . As Web 2.0 mainly relies on Ajax and complex JS libraries the speed of a web browser's JavaScript interpretation and rendering is becoming more and more important . According to various web benchmarks for w3 standards all of them shows IE slowest browser when it comes to JavaScript and CSS interpretation and rendering( http://acid3.acidtests.org , http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html ). With Google and Yahoo having most of its stake with AJAX based applications these days , Microsoft has also turned a bit with AJAX implementation of Live.com and according to this post http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/08/28/728654.aspx they are also trying to improve their JScript engine due to world wide criticism of the browser. Anyway...