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Asa, one of the most public figures behind the Mozilla foundation (and thus behind Firefox), recently posted about Mozilla’s goals with Firefox, and why it doesn’t make sense to turn Firefox over to a for profit corporation. One of their main goals with Firefox is “to protect [the Internet] and to help it grow in ways that are beneficial to everyone rather than just a few.” Their main way of accomplishing such a noble goal is to zealously protect open standards, and advance such standards through Firefox and related Mozilla technologies.As part of Asa’s blog entry, he makes this statement: “Today [the Internet] is under a renewed assault from shiny new proprietary systems like Silverlight and Air, and Mozilla must use whatever leverage it has to continue to defend open standards and interoperability so that no one is locked out of participation or locked in to the single-vendor solutions that are corroding the foundations of this amazing global shared resource.”I think his reasoning behind this “Air assaults the Internet” remark is that Air is a proprietary product, and we have no guarantee from Adobe that Air will always serve the Internet’s best interests (open standards). If Air gains a huge market share, web developers will be forced to pay attention to Air users, just like we are forced to cater to IE 6 users today. So I guess I can see his point. Personally, I am a HUGE fan of open standards, as I have wasted a lot of time over the years trying to get web sites to work in all the popular web browsers. However, I have never thought of things like Adobe Air or the Flash player as being related to the standards debate, because they are just plugins that web browsers can support. However, if Adobe has their way, I suppose they’d love to see the majority of the web run on Flash/Air. I’d like to hear your thoughts on Asa’s allegations.