A bytecode standard is a decent idea, but I worry that it would be "good enough" for nearly everyone. What I think we really want is something more akin to what we have for native development: choice.
We should have things like JVMs for the browser (cached on the client-side, no doubt), but we should also have non-portable code for people who want to do things that cannot be done portably. A bytecode standard cannot be all things to all people, because some people need to do things that can't be done on some platforms.
If you really want everything to move to the web you need to expose vector math instructions for video encoding, you need to expose CUDA for scientific applications and so on. You need to be able to ship machine-code to the client where it can run (properly sandboxed, no doubt).
Of course, if you want everything to move to the web there are bigger problems to overcome - HTML and CSS aren't really suited to application development, the filesystem APIs are not sufficient, and there's still the problem of getting GUI applications to compose well...
We should have things like JVMs for the browser (cached on the client-side, no doubt), but we should also have non-portable code for people who want to do things that cannot be done portably. A bytecode standard cannot be all things to all people, because some people need to do things that can't be done on some platforms.
If you really want everything to move to the web you need to expose vector math instructions for video encoding, you need to expose CUDA for scientific applications and so on. You need to be able to ship machine-code to the client where it can run (properly sandboxed, no doubt).
Of course, if you want everything to move to the web there are bigger problems to overcome - HTML and CSS aren't really suited to application development, the filesystem APIs are not sufficient, and there's still the problem of getting GUI applications to compose well...