Yeah, that's the position of Google's NativeClient project. But it's not backwards compatible with older browsers, which is the reason for doing this how they a

Yeah, that's the position of Google's NativeClient project. But it's not backwards compatible with older browsers, which is the reason for doing this how they are. asm.js will run in any browser supporting JS already, and will be faster in browsers supporting the optimizations. It's not perfect, but it works now.