You are right in principle. All it takes is to make the browser a real VM environment with security guarantees, a standardized interface, etc. But that is not going to happen anytime soon, because virtualization technology is not there yet and pretty complicated, and a browser does not have VM isolation and reliable execution as primary tasks. In fact, if you remember, a browser's primary task is rendering HTML.

I do expect that some day, many browsers will come with a standardized sand-box that does fulfill all these requirements, but they do not these days and JavaScript is not, by any measure, even a reasonable approximation. I think getting there will at least require a stall in browser development (because they are finished) for several years. That seems to be quite some time in the future.

For most things, that is actually not true. For the few things that need to beat the interaction limit (~200ms), a web-application might not be the right choice in the first place.

While I fully agree on the server-side validation, one thing the client cannot be trusted to do either is keep your web-app isolated from others, which basically invalidates the whole idea for anything serious. Really, a web-browser is not a VM, even if often misused as such these days. If you need that fast response, probably best move away from the idea of doing it as a web-app, especially as the browser does not ensure fast response either. Unless you want to start coding for a specific browser in a specific version running on a specific platform?

Oh, I do understand the arguments for it, but it still causes a lot more problems than it solves, and hence should not be done, ever. Reliability and security are critical. If you do not have them, stop right there. Wanting "fancy" is not a valid excuse to mess up. And lets face it, most modern web applications have pretty low actual processing needs. An inefficient implementation on the server-side is not a valid excuse to do processing on the client. It is an often used one though.

With real software, I do not have that. Reading comprehension: fail.

Sorry, I cannot tell you my sources, so I will decline to give numbers as you could not verify or compare them meaningfully. That would be unfair.

Let me just say that I make about 10% less (scaled up to 100% employment), but get to chose my own work hours, have quite a bit of freedom how and where I want to work and get paid for every single minute of overtime (or can take vacation for it). I would say I have a better deal. And working with large infrastructure? I had my very own cluster (self-designed and self-built) while doing my PhD and did some pretty impressive data-processing there, hence large infrastructure does not impress me one bit. Sure for people that are "good", but not excellent, Google is a valid choice, but these days it is just a nicer corporate hell than the other ones. As long as I can avoid that, I will.

Entirely plausible.

Well, I went through the interview process basically because a friend at Google asked me too and he had a dire need for somebody like me in his team. I can only call the whole interview process an utter fail on their side, they are not equipped to deal with people that have actual experience, insight and know what they are talking about. Fortunately, I did not get an offer. (At that time I was pissed, of course, but turns out they did not really hire anybody for the whole rest of that year.) On the other hand, they kept asking me to re-interview for years until I finally just told them that sure, I would come in for a day, they just needed to advance me my daily fee of $1600. That shut them up finally.

So you man all looks and no function?

Idiots trying to be cool are still idiots. On the other hand, the content industry is in such a bad shape, that cool idiots may be an improvement.

And in addition, those using it do not understand how they should actually doing things. Browser-side application logic is a nightmare and cannot ever be reliable or secure. If you really need client-side processing, do a real piece of software for it. A browser is just a glorified terminal, _not_ processing infrastructure.

Simple: Client-side executable content in web-pages is an exceedingly stupid idea, so all the bright language designers stay away from it. Hence it is JavaScript for all those that do not understand how to do a web application right.

Indeed. And with server-side generated clean HTML, you also get rid of all the browser issues. This is really another example of technology being misused to (badly) cover up architect, designer and coder incompetence.

Do your damn application logic on the server, as it is indented to. Everything else is insecure and unreliable. Really, that something is possible to do does not mean it is by any means a good idea.

Have a look at Google("Linux in Laptops") and install one yourself. Yes, takes a bit of time, but you recover that by not having to clean the pre-installed machine of all unwanted "goodies" the manufacturer added. For example, putting Mint 17 on my Acer Netbook took 5 Minutes of work and 1 h of waiting.