> Having one modern browser ditch JavaScript would already be a huge win, and people who care could use it.
For a short while, maybe, but as people making websites don't care about minority browsers, the amount of important websites you wouldn't be able to use through that browser would only grow, until the point that browser becomes useless.
People making money off user-hostile activities won't voluntarily stop making money off user-hostile activities.
There are people who have a website and don't want to monetize the visitors. I want a standardized web for them. Not everbody has to belong to that group for it to have merit.
I don't expect Microsoft or Google to stop making their online office stuff. Honestly, I couldn't care less what they are doing. I want solutions for those that serve the users, and nobody else.
I can see the benefit to having languages other than javascript run in the browser, though, but the only way there seems to be WebAssembly.
The functionality in my browser is important. The more the browser is scriptable, the better, but not from the website.
The code on my machine is reviewed, vetted, accounted, maintained and free. That is the big difference.
If the end result is the same functionality as was being provided by javascript, then if you didn't trust the javascript, you can't trust the (now Turing complete) HTML. The same trust and verification issues exist, just moved to another level of abstraction.
>The code on my machine is reviewed, vetted, accounted, maintained and free. That is the big difference.
Is it? By whom? Not by you personally, not all of it. Blind trust is unavoidable at some point.
For example, we can do tables in HTML. We need no scripting nor plugin for that. For a contrary example, without JavaScript or plugin we can't serve our website as a torrent that is then loaded by the visitors from other visitors. But we can standardize that functionality and add it to the browser. The code for that functionality would then be developed by the browser developers as a part of the browser, and delivered with the browser. The website would just deliver the torrent file and the necessary meta information for it. That way no code or script from the website would need to be executed to have the desired functionality.
I don't blindly trust developers. I nearly exclusively use packages from my distribution. These programs are maintained and signed by people with recorded track record of their behaviour as a maintainer, and they are vetted for by others. They don't have an interest to track or montized me, and it is a limited set of people I need to trust. Also, I can hold back on updates, and refuse them, if I choose to do so. Programs that come from other sources are carefully looked at by me. there is a big difference to automatically downloaded and executed code from some website.
I'd love to have a "standard web" that's entirely focused on providing visitors information in an efficient manner. And by efficient I mean not fighting attempts at providing better UIs or aggregating information through machine methods.