Hopefully WebAssembly will help to alleviate this somewhat. Back in the day, JavaScript didn't have so much of a monopoly on, as we called it back then, "DHTML

Hopefully WebAssembly will help to alleviate this somewhat. Back in the day, JavaScript didn't have so much of a monopoly on, as we called it back then, "DHTML". IE could also do VBscript, and there was a way to do Tcl in various browsers, too. And with Flash, back in the ActionScript 2 days, you could use the vaporware-to-be ECMAscript 4, which was rather different from either ES3 or ES5, and, imo, it was a shame that it was abandoned. Java applets, Silverlight. These things wound up with a poor security record, but I think something like the PPAPI introduced with Chrome helps to mitigate that security risk by A LOT, since plugins are run in their own processes and sandboxed. While I'm trying to be optimistic about WebAssembly, I can't help but think that a PPAPI/PNaCl-based solution would be ideal, along with a better UX for installing and managing such plugins.