What Brendan is missing is that the contest is not closed between JavaScript and Dart. The elephant in the room is the huge and growing mobile space where ObjectiveC and Java rule. It's not about "Works only in Chrome", it's about "Works only on iOS/Android".
What you are missing is the bleeding obvious: the topic of that other thread where I commented was Google's leaked memo about Dart as "replacement" for JS -- that memo created "the contest".
Obj-C and Java are not browser-supported. Sure, there's a native apps vs. web apps contest. Native is winning? Not according to Fred Wilson (AVC) and other observers.
Who knows, really. We're speculating, but let's find out by doing. Mozilla is working on both Open Web Apps that run in modern browsers, and Boot To Gecko.
With all due respect to the awesome work Mozilla is doing, I'm not seeing in your response anything about mobile-native-jshtml5 platform. Funny enough, Microsoft is currently promoting jshtml5 as a platform harder than Mozilla is, and given their platform unification message, that ought to include the mobile/tablet space as well.
Edit. I'll have to retract the above. BootToGecko is the mobile platform from Mozilla. It would be awesome to market it harder as such.
Thanks for the retraction, and you're right: we are not going head-on against "mobile-native-jshtml5" (new one on me, but I know what you mean). I'm talking about B2G at Web 2.0 Expo New York this week. We will work up our marketing as we get closer to first hardware product launch with our partners.
Edit: we are, however, trying not to make special sauce on top of the web standards. Instead we're working with W3C and WAC to standardize device APIs progressively as we go.
