Competition is good but browser fragmentation is the last thing we need. Good that IE highlights one area where browsers differ, but still, I wonder if we will ever get to write once run anywhere.
Unfortunately I'm afraid some fragmentation is going to happen, though not necessarily around browser axis.
This is actually a deeper problem. It's not about standards, it's about performance.
"Old" web (where old is almost anything up to just recently) got to the point that whatever you do, can run reasonably well virtually everywhere (welcome to dream, write once, run on PC / Mac / Linux / iPhone / Android).
"New" web (what runs on nightlies / alphas / canaries) will need enough raw power for all its shininess.
Old web was seriously underusing resources on modern computers, so there was enough slack to cut / optimize away. New web is about reclaiming back this idle unused power.
If you get a terrible performance in some recent demos (and yet you see other people telling how good something runs), welcome to inequalities of new HW accelerated web.
Problems can be:
a) bad GPU drivers preventing your HW performing well (old drivers, weird manufacturer's driver versions for notebooks, not-completely-fine-tuned drivers for Linux / Mac),
b) your HW is not very powerful (netbooks, mobile devices, integrated GPUs).
This is something standards can't hide. You can have software emulation fallbacks to be compliant, but this will not really help practically, especially not on underpowered devices.
And this is in addition to performance differences coming from different browsers implementations (which may all perfectly comply with standards).
Not too different, in the end. The "Old" web was "patched" with excessive Flash, which slowed it down for many users.
I'll take the "New" web browsers over Flash, though. Better hardware acceleration (such as for large images) should've been done long ago, and Flash is a security / stability / (usually) usability nightmare.
Old web's patch is for the most part optional, if you don't want the shinies. With "new" web, what is there to disable if your hw can't handle it's stress?
Not entirely, as it's only recently that anything even remotely challenging Flash has been a viable option, and where fallbacks / functional pages without it exist frequently.
I do agree with your second point, however. Is it too much to hope that the standard JS libraries will eventually support scalable shininess?
