We are in the process of considering the appropriate platform for the
first release of the next generation of our software we develop in
house. Although not a classic example of a typical web application, we
have several business reasons that may take us to a web deployment. I
am researching the possibilities of what our interface would look like
on the web.

Outlook Web Access does a very good job of blurring the line between
web application and desktop app.  Looking at the source code it appears
OWA 2003 is mostly accomplishing its look and feel with traditional
HTML and a whole lot of JavaScript.

Does anyone know if this assumption is correct? Was it developed with
any developer tools to generate the scripts, or was it done with more
traditional web development?  We have a shop of developers very
familiar with VB.NET and Visual Studio, but we would likely not be able
to develop a web app comprised of hand-written JavaScript and HTML.

Also, I am trying to find out what capabilities IE has that is not
supplied by Firefox and Netscape (at least without a plug-in).

If there is a more appropriate forum for this topic, please let me
know.