Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich and Microsoft's Chris Wilson are <A HREF="http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,139188-pg,1/article.html">trading heated rhetoric over the proposed next version of ECMAScript,</A> better known as JavaScript.

Microsoft is quibbling with the ECMAScript Edition 4 effort, which is supported by Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser. "As I've frequently spoken about publicly, compatibility with the current web ecosystem--not 'breaking the Web'--is something we take very seriously," Wilson wrote on the Internet Explorer team blog this week. "In our opinion, a revolution in ECMAScript would be best done with an entirely new language, so we could continue supporting existing users as well as freeing the new language from constraints."

Eich is the creator of JavaScript, a programming language that has become a bedrock Internet technology, helping drive much of the rich content and information now common on the Web. Microsoft's implementation of it is known as JScript.