A million geeks just winced at that headline and are preparing patient explanations of the difference between a browser and a VM, but, as ZDNet’s John Carroll very cogently points out, an awful lot of application-style interaction happens in your browser these days, and Chrome is Google’s bid to own that. He also draws an analogy to Java as it was first conceived: a platform that could run an application on any machine. What, after all, is an Ajax-based Web site or an interactive Flash game but an app that was written once and can be run just about anywhere? Java will still be a player in this new market, but it won’t be the foundation of it as it was imagined to be long ago. Still, the brewing update to Java 6 SE is aimed at improving the startup time of that old Java dream, the applet. Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond has an interesting point: “The JRE is slimming down at the same time as alternative plug-ins like Silverlight and Flash/Flex are getting beefier, so it helps to make Java (with JavaFX) a competitive alternative to other RIA platform technologies”; if you’re a cynic, you can say that computing power is finally catching up with the needs of the Java platform so that Java isn’t totally slow and buggy. In related news, JavaFXpert James Weaver is eagerly showing off how nicely JavaFX plays with our new Google overlords. Technology Industry