None of what timbl said in that post (nor what anything, from memory, in that thread said) covered shipping native code to the browser: it was merely talking about privileged web apps, which is a very different problem area (and one that should definitely be explored!).
Yes, my comment was concerning the top-down approach taken by browser vendors, and that web apps need to be empowered with low-level APIs such as TCP and POSIX. I don't think I said or TBL said that we need to ship native code to browsers to do this. We don't. We don't need another language. Javascript is fine. We do need better low-level APIs. We do need to get away from relying on browser vendors to spec and implement everything correctly, because with such a massive surface like they're targeting they won't. We do need to push this responsibility out to the edges. We need to drastically reduce the standard API and move the functionality from high level (as in IndexedDB) to low level (as in POSIX). We need a strong powerful stable small core and OSS must do the rest. That's the general idea. The finer details can be nitpicked and that won't invalidate the general idea. Browser vendors are simply doing way too much.
