CCP has problems with growing the player base and interest level in EVE. CCP does not appear to be overly aware of proper game design, market mechanics, their target market, or their actual player base.
When the teams at CCP are told by management they need to come up with ideas to increase interest in the game, they spitball a bunch of stuff at the whiteboard to see what sticks. “3D character interaction! Faction Wars! AI mining teams! Pirate bases that easily kill 80% of the characters they encounter! Resouce Wars!”. (Those are the ones that ‘stuck’, by the way, you’ll have to imagine your own supply of ‘ideas too bad for CCP to consider’.)
Then they can all draw paychecks for another 6 months while they do a half-assed job of implementing whatever the new idea is, toss it live without QA, spend 6 months apologizing for the bugs in it and saying “we’re all working triple-overtime to get this fixed for you, our beloved players!”, and then quietly forget the whole thing and cobble together the next big project.
I’m not sure how anyone at CCP put “the type of players who play EVE plus the type of complicated, awkward interface EVE uses plus the need for extremely short client-server response time plus CCP’s inability to get even chat working properly” and boiled that down to “Yes, browser play is what we need to reach more of our target market!”.
Of course, CCP could also be planning to dumb EVE down to the point where the browser-play market is a suitable player base, who knows? At any rate, I expect this to be yet another initiative where they throw a years development resources away on a failed side project, while continuing to ignore the actual fundamental issues of the game that currently pays all the bills.