Do you remember how much the Web used to suck?

Not so long ago, we Web developers would have to constantly educate product managers and other business stakeholders about the limitations of HTML; we would often contrast it with so-called “rich client” technologies.

Over the past few years, we’ve all watched with wonder as these boundaries have disappeared and the Ajax revolution brought us a never-ending supply of rich web applications.

And while Ajax started out as web developers leveraging little-used so-called “latent” browser technologies, browser makers haven’t been sitting idle. Modern browsers are acquiring new abilities at a pace not seen since the early years of the Web–most of which are largely unused by today’s web applications.

Dion and I started Ajaxian.com a few years back when we like many others felt that a revolution was about to take place, and we’ve been fortunate to be able to chronicle a bit of it as it happened. We feel like the Web is similarly positioned today, ready for another expansion as developers discover and leverage the next generation of browsers.

We’ve been fortunate to do a bit of that expansion ourselves at Mozilla with the Bespin project. What Dion and I started as an experiment to see if we could create a code editor on the Web as responsive as the desktop has turned into a full-fledged project team aiming to revolutionize the way the world writes code.

At the same time the Web has been expanding, we’ve all been blown away as desktop computers have somehow shrunk down to pocket size. Clearly a revolution in hardware is taking place and it doesn’t take a prophet to work out that the future of computing lies along this new trajectory.

However, my enthusiasm for this amazing new world is tempered by some unfortunate decisions made by some of the players in this space. It seems that some view this revolution as a chance to seize power in downright Orwellian ways by constraining what we as developers can say, dictating what kinds of apps we can create, controlling how we distribute our apps, and placing all kinds of limits on what can do to our computing devices.

And so as my good friend and long-time collaborator Dion so eloquently explains over at his blog, he and I have taken an opportunity to work at Palm–at the very intersection of these two exciting technology arcs–and we have the opportunity to run Palm’s developer program and to do things quite a bit differently than some others in the industry have done.

Dion and I believe in the Web platform–an open platform that no single vendor controls–and we believe in empowering and enabling developers. We have been honored to work with so many who feel the same way at Mozilla, we will continue to advocate those values as members of the Mozilla community, and we can’t wait to put these ideals into practice in our work at Palm.