BS. There are never enough cycles. First, SpiderMonkey is the next-gen JS engine for FireFox. V8 is the Google JS engine. Second, Flash Player 10 is as good o

BS. There are never enough cycles. First, SpiderMonkey is the next-gen JS engine for FireFox. V8 is the Google JS engine. Second, Flash Player 10 is as good or better than any JS engine (with the possible exception of V8), and many Flash games bog on my netbook. Just one example, but, as more capable web apps come online, the bar will rise, and more cycles will be called for. You're right that this is similar to the Java vs. C (or C++) debate. And, as with that debate, the answer is that, for many application domains, native code has a significant performance advantage.