1) This is no more "grief" than having different buttons on different web pages.
With the rapid maturation of the web and the development of good usability and accessibility heuristics for interface design, it seems pretty likely that reasonable users and reasonable designers would always find "grief" in inconsistent use of buttons attributes. If SUBMIT is red on screen 4 but green on screen 6 that is definitely grief. If the SUBMIT button is on the left of CANCEL on screen 2 but under and on the right of it on screen 5, don't be surprised if users abandon the app as being ... [choose expletive].
2) Different desktop applications also support different hot keys (=access keys).
Accesskeys are cool features for web applications but there has to be some sort of consistency across applications. And here, we're talking about inconsistency within the same application, but across competing browsers. This is just no way to build a useful standard.
Denny Adelman
