The modern web browser as a universal VM is the single greatest technical achievement in the history of personal computing. I think Ryan is spot on here. There'

The modern web browser as a universal VM is the single greatest technical achievement in the history of personal computing. I think Ryan is spot on here. There's plenty of reason to be critical of the web as a platform, but the reality is that we have finally achieved what people dreamed about in the 80s and 90s; a true write-once-run-everywhere platform. And Javascript (more specifically, V8) is core to that.