I am glad that they are ditching all of the pluggins, but sad that they are settling on javascript as their primary language.
I know that the Hacker News community is very pro-javascript for the most part, so I expect to be down-voted.
But at the very least, I think javascript could benefit from more competition.
I remember when Microsoft was the company that made standards, now they seem be playing catch-up with the rest of the industry.
What I really would have loved to see them do is completely reinvent the browser from the ground up. Support javascript and html 5 as "legacy" but create a new, effective, and fast language for applications and rendering.
Web browsers are still stuck in document mode. We don't see anything wrong with this, but links and back buttons are not the best way to control application state. We have moved beyond documents and primarily create applications these days (even if they are document-hosting applications like blogs). Imagine if Photoshop was controlled using links and back buttons. I know that javascript is capable of more advanced, realtime techniques, but most websites are stilled laid out in the page by page format these days. On top of it all, even V8 javascript still runs 10-20x slower than C.
The choice is javascript and Html OR .Net and Xaml, not just javascript. While the plugin is dead, the stack is not.
I remember when C#/VB.Net first start competing head to head and it quickly became apparent that C# had won even though there were originally more VB devs.
It's far from decided yet. MS's usual javascript style is actually fairly odd and irritating compared to what we're all used to, so I wouldn't be surprised if people avoid it. They also have been pushing a bit of an odd way of attempting to get intellisense support on js.
Even the code examples coming out of MS shouldn't be noted, they used to pump out a lot of VB.Net examples when everyone else was using C#, which wasn't too bad as you could convert them fairly easily.
The more I think about this, the more it looks like it's going to be a messy fight. If you want to see what's winning, watch the questions on StackOverflow.
BTW, they've also created a lot of vendor specific CSS extensions including a grid, so they are attempting to get out of document mode and move html forward. I know your gripe though, always irritated me too.
Yes, I know, Microsoft was clearly the one who pushed for CSS3 grid positioning, but it's also a standard that can be adopted by any other browser and, as someone who has used it a bit, I really hope it will be.
cross language comparions are bogus and their results can't be extrapolated to all apps, but these examples show that V8 is much closer to raw C perf than you might expect.
Imagine if javascript engines were browser plugins. We'd have competition at the js engine level, not just the browser level. Good ideas in a js engine could more easily make the rounds to all browsers, without having to upgrade an entire browser.
I know that the Hacker News community is very pro-javascript for the most part, so I expect to be down-voted.
But at the very least, I think javascript could benefit from more competition.
I remember when Microsoft was the company that made standards, now they seem be playing catch-up with the rest of the industry.
What I really would have loved to see them do is completely reinvent the browser from the ground up. Support javascript and html 5 as "legacy" but create a new, effective, and fast language for applications and rendering.
Web browsers are still stuck in document mode. We don't see anything wrong with this, but links and back buttons are not the best way to control application state. We have moved beyond documents and primarily create applications these days (even if they are document-hosting applications like blogs). Imagine if Photoshop was controlled using links and back buttons. I know that javascript is capable of more advanced, realtime techniques, but most websites are stilled laid out in the page by page format these days. On top of it all, even V8 javascript still runs 10-20x slower than C.