The web browser is being sold to developers as a "general applications platform" to compete with native applications. Since native environments often give the

The web browser is being sold to developers as a "general applications platform" to compete with native applications. Since native environments often give the developer a greater degree of language-choice freedom as well as greater degree of access to complex APIs, I fail to see how offering the same freedoms in the comparatively miniscule browser API would cause the complexity to outweigh the benefits. If browser makers just standardized on a language-neutral runtime like the JVM or the CLR then no central committee would have to be responsible for maintaining support for specific languages.