It is the path of least resistance to get to a 'Desktop' experience. And please, what are the alternatives?
Firefox ? I'm sorry, but Firefox lost relevance a couple of years ago now.
Firefox is ethically the best , but it sucks in implementation. Firefox is now the broccoli of the web, stale broccoli at that.
ActiveX is pretty cool, and gives you a "desktop" experience. You should look into it if you like letting one corporation lock you into their proprietary version of the web.
At least there it's not really any different than shipping a WPF application that's tied to Windows. It's a desktop application, people are used to desktop applications being vendor-specific. I don't like the idea of people getting used to web apps being vendor-specific though. That's not okay. We have a chance to make it right this time. If it runs on your desktop and is vendor-specific, that's a shame but that's expected. If it runs in a browser and is vendor-specific, that's setting a bad precedent that we worked for years to overcome with IE6.
Of course, that's just my personal philosophy. Everyone is different.
