And rightly so. Being locked into a store worries me much, much less than being locked into using JS and HTML.
That you aren't worried doesn't mean that you're correct.
JS and HTML are about the only things offering freedom on the internet these days.
it was going just fine until apple disabled it in iOS7
but despite that setback, google continues to bank its entire business on offline web apps.
That doesn't preclude other sources and as you've noted, HTML and JavaScripts are Web technologies which are of course a subset of... the internet! Besides, these days not all IP packets are transited equally.
As far as I'm concerned, you are comparing two relatively small and often overlapping subsets of internet based technology, and you are making assumptions about the internet as a whole based on that comparison. I don't mean to say that you don't understand the difference between the words, but saying that HTML/JS offers the most freedom seems to ignore the less restrictive technologies it is built on.
Surely, the ability to use an open source software stack to create a socket connection and send arbitrary data to a different machine across the network offers more freedom than HTML/JS in a general sense of the word.
As for not all IP packets being transited equally, I'd say that it's more the result of internet freedom than it is of any sort of restrictive policiy. The way to stop it is either a more restrictive law, or an inconvenience great enough to get people to vote with their feet.
1) markup languages: 1 choice - HTML 2) client-side scripting languages: 1 choice - JS.
PS: please don't tell me about transpilation, it's crap.
Contrast that to the preferred emacs/vim + terminal tools of your average developer. No one is trying to make this easier for us, and those that are get ignored (like Adobe Muse, maybe?).
But several people seem to insist that's a poor solution. It sounds like they want direct support for other languages in the browser but how can they securely directly support other languages?
Even if you found some way to get some other language into the browser without translating to javascript; (and this has been done before. remember vbscript?)... the new guest language has to co-exist with any javascript that might also run on the page, share the same memory, share the same dom objects, share the same GC, and avoid all the multiple potential nasty browser crashing bugs that could result from trying to do that. And you have to ship the runtime for that language along with the browser, or as sigh another plugin. And guess what, no backwards compatibility.
Given that, you then have to cope with the fact that javascript's GC might not totally make sense for your language, and do all the workarounds that requires.
Compiling to ASM.js gets around this by essentially giving you a low level VM whose bytecode just happens to look like javascript, and whose behavior when interpreted as javascript happens to be correct. When run in firefox, the code is short circuited and ahead-of-time compiled. It doesn't have to deal with the javascript GC since it allocates a heap for the guest program ahead of time as well.
This is really cool if you think about it. You get javascript's more or less secure sandboxing, you get access to all the apis, you can interact just fine with existing javascript libraries, with about the lowest amount of overhead you can get just short of the NaCl approach (which is basically just a revisit of activeX)
The only downside to all this:
it's not the web.
This is not web. It runs in a web browser, but it's downloading a blob up front, ahead of time compiling, and playing a raw executable inside a browser host.
There's considerable advantages to zero-install programs and games. But you know, exchanging one kind of opaque inaccessible blob in a webpage for a different kind that just happens to not need plugins is not that great.
Accessibility is a good thing, and we shouldn't be too eager to throw it away for the shiny.