I'm sorry but I have to side with the "oxygen is utter crap" crowd. It's too reactive, causing all kinds of materials to degrade, and sometimes they even burst into flame! Helium, Neon, Argon are much better, but even Nitrogen, which isn't perfect, is better than Oxygen.

The single redeeming feature of Oxygen is that it's pretty much everywhere, and yeah sure we can all breathe it and don't have any other choices for gases to breathe. If it wasn't for that fact I doubt anyone would care much for it.

Ok, I'm paraphrasing and extending what you said to make my point... Javascript being in every browser, to the exclusion of all other languages, is a huge factor in its popularity and utility, and it's the main driving force towards improving the language. If Javascript didn't become the in-browser language, it probably wouldn't have existed at all. Instead we'd have some other small language with similar design flaws, or maybe Perl would have been adopted as the in-browser language. At the time it was the main language for server-side web development, it was already embeddable and used for in-app scripting (like Lua is today), and I recall a browser extension for Netscape that let you use it instead of Javascript. IE, of course, would only have had VBScript.

Pick your poison.