The Day One Keynote from this years Google I/O conference covers all this html5 stuff very well and demonstrates that this is all available right now, if you pretend that Microsoft doesn't exist. They demo the Firefox 3.5 stuff, and they also demo an internal test version of YouTube that just uses HTML5 <video> and no plugins, which looks awesome. Dailymotion already have one of these: http://blog.dailymotion.com/2009/05/27/watch-videowithout-fl...

Firefox 3.5 is coming out very soon and auto-update means that your can expect 80%+ of Firefox users to have updated within a few months. Firefox 2 usage is now practically zero, for example. Safari is in the same boat and also supports most of the same HTML 5 stuff that FF3.5 does, as does Chrome. Most of the cool bits of HTML5 should be widely available by the end of the year: video & audio tags, local storage, web worker threads, etc... You can start to rely on this stuff being available by the end of the year, if you pretend that Microsoft doesn't exist.

The CSS and javascript frameworks that are rapidly maturing (like YUI, jQuery, Dojo etc..) have really eased my browser support burden over the last year or two. I can now rapidly code something up using YUI reset-fonts-grids, add fancy effects with jQuery and have it work first time cross browser, from IE6 to Chrome. Using these tools has made cross browser dev. time plummet. Older browsers are slowly fading in usage and development cost, which is excellent news. There are other tools like Google Web Toolkit (GWT - which was used to build the Google Wave UI, amongst other things) which are more comprehensive still and introduce a different, browser agnostic, way of developing web apps. These tools really help you to pretend that Microsoft doesn't exist.

In addition, I think the adoption of the multiprocess model for web browsers which Chrome is leading the charge on, along with IE8 (and Mozilla are talking about it), is going to cause a bit of a shakedown in the plugins space. With plugins running in a different process, people will finally find out how often they crash. Once people are visibly shown that 50%+ of what used to be (masked as) browser crashes are actually plugin crashes (mostly flash), then I think attitudes may change. It will certainly put extra pressure on plugin vendors to fix their busted crap, anyway. People often underestimate the power of simple things like this, just shining a light on a previously hidden problem can often make it shrivel away.

The elephant in the room is obviously Microsoft, who are far more interested in pushing their proprietary Silverlight plugin, so that they can shift more Visual Studio licences, then in any of this other stuff. They've amply demonstratetd with the extended undeath of IE6 that they hate and fear web applications, don't know how to respond to them and would far rather purposefully cause the whole web to stagnate forever, than see web applications become successful. Hopefully we can succeed in spite of them, or gain momentum and drag them along anyway, kicking and screaming.

Google pitched Wave at IO as a 'killer app.' for HTML5 - something cool and useful to drive adoption. Everything that I've seen leads me to believe that this might well work. Google have a really deep understanding of the web and know that everything that's ever really succeeded on the web has been both open and distributed, so they've built Wave that way.

Either way, it's a pretty exciting time to be doing web development! If you haven't watched any of the stuff from this years Google IO, then you really should at least watch the keynotes:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?oe=UTF-8&sourceid=na...