There is a plugin for FireFox (on Windows and Linux only), once that is loaded it works for VMware server and ESX 3.5+ not sure about 3 or 2.5.
The web console is kludgey (as it must be by design really) but no, when they did it VMware did not consider a proper bare bones AJAX implementation - along the lines of what people like google favour. Instead they just used .Net.

VIClient (on windows only) is much better than the web console. It may work under mono one day, but maybe not. No-one has made that work yet that I can find...

The WORST part about all this is that the marketers leave out of all communications 'requires windows' and 'windows only' messages so people read about features like web-clients, cool console programs and Add-ons for FireFox* but then waste their time d/l them and trying to get them running on various Linux', BSD and Mac systems to somewhat limited avail.

Note 1 * not distributed via Mozilla Add-ons, they are a direct download from the host
Note 2 * and you have to open 8222 or 8333 to connect

+1

+1

+1

You're assuming VMWare actually cares about their customers. They're too busy making grand claims about the performance of games in Fusion 3.......which btw still sucks.

+1