if JavaFX is meant to compete with shockwave / flash / silverlight, it will lose. they are far better in the visual support, have better development tools, and have smaller plugins (except by Silverlight). anyway, none of them block the browser during startup. if JavaFX is meant to be a new dynamic / scripting language, it will lose too. we have better stuff like groovy, ruby, python, or anything. javaFX is still stuck to classic java verbosity. the power demos we have of javaFX are just made by power gurus that developed them along several weeks. javaFX is not useful for real-word commercial teams who need productivity, control, cheap budgets. if not, we could say that anything could be done in any language. we could really write browser plugins in C++ instead of javaFX. but using flash is faster, and cheaper