I read about MS live.com and their web application approach and was curious what they are doing and where MS is going.
They are only starting but I am impressed how easy and comfortable it is to build one's own page. I arranged the different areas via drag & drop on the screen. No waiting for page refreshes at all. You can choose from 1 to 4 column layouts from a popup menu and immediately work with the new layout. Very strait forward. Learners and teachers will get used to this easy handling - an interesting challenge for Moodle.
MS offerers so called gadgets for live.com. To get many developers they started a contest. The standard approach for a commercial company to get programming work for free
By the way I was on the site with Firefox and everything I tried worked with FF. In the past I made quite different experiences concerning compatibility.
Urs