Chromium Embedded Framework: http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/

CefSharp (.NET Bindings): https://github.com/ataranto/CefSharp

Yep, use ataranto's fork, ours is hacked up and out-of-date.

"any highschool kid can go ahead and just build it"

What high school did you go to where everyone was an expert on multithreading, network io, disk io, bidirectional synchronization, and state persistence?

At the PHP shop.

Congratulations, you've created something far better than what Asana and their huge team took 3+ years to build.

Sounds painful.

"Let me take you back to 2006. ...iTunes was horribly slow..."

We've come so far since then!

Ha, I haven't used it since I got a Zune, so I was uncomfortable making assumptions :)

Dropbox does in fact use mach_star.

"I know I could probably whip together a decent email client in C++ within a couple months from scratch and maybe a week or two if I used any number of libraries out there."

Want to know how I know that you've never written an email client?

They bought some other brewery's beer at the store for way too much money, slapped a Google label on it, and now it tastes worse?

tl;dr: people take uber to and from bars. that's it. not sure why that took so many paragraphs and images.