I agree CSS and various API issues are a high threat. In many cases they are a problem right now.

But I disagree it is 1% for the risks mentioned before regarding the Dart VM in Chrome. It's hard to estimate that. If Chrome continues to increase in market share, it will no longer be a "huge chunk" of the market that they lose if they do not support dart2js, and furthermore, it isn't just a matter of working or not, but also how much focus on bugfixing and performance work they put on the JS fallback. It's easy to imagine many developers (especially smaller ones) developing in chrome and testing in chrome, and just verifying basic stuff works in other browsers.

We are not far from that risk today in other areas, for example important sites like Google Docs already say "For an enhanced and optimized experience, use Chrome". The risk gets that much worse when Chrome is actually running completely separate content in the Dart VM from everyone else.

If Chrome gets 90% marketshare, even if they don't ship DartVM, and even if they only implement approved specs, there will be differences in implementation and bugs that drive developers to make sites that don't work on other browsers. We saw this with IE bugs when IE was dominant.

The only defense against this is to preserve competition. My continual criticism in these HN threads is that people's vision is too narrow, too focused on irrelevant battles, focusing energies in the wrong place.

These are two battles going on right now. WebKit derived vs Mozilla, and Web vs native Mobile. The latter is a serious threat and no one is really offering anything to attack the problem. And no, FirefoxOS and asm.js doesn't.

Simply put, consumers find it easier to find and buy content on native platforms, and developers find it easier to use tools on native platforms. The Web has a huge looming consumer and developer problem. A lot of people who sit around in VIM/Sublime all day hacking MVC or jQuery websites don't seem to realize the looming problems.

Web Development needs to be made radically more productive. Web Performance needs to be radically upped. The current tap dancing around ES6 improvements or ION/ODINEngine are nice, but simply too underwhelming.

Web Components are a step in the right direction. But honestly, if I wasn't working for Google right now, I wouldn't be writing a web app these days, I've be writing an iOS or Android app.

Both Google and Mozilla have huge problems to solve IMHO, and this bickering over Dart, NaCL, Asm.js, et al is a big distraction. These organizations need to work together to make the web delightful on mobile and for developers as the whole industry transitions.

Yes, on mobile native is winning. I'm not sure there is much Google and Mozilla can do though. The main platform for app developers is iOS. The only way to counter that is to take market share from iOS (a goal towards which everything that can be done, is being done).

People make iOS apps and not web apps because iOS apps perform better on iOS than web apps on iOS. And iOS is where most app money is made. Making the web a better platform in general won't directly help with that, important as a goal it is.

I don't agree there is "bickering" over Dart, NaCl/PNaCl, asm.js. There are issues of principle there. For example, if we make the platform stronger but it loses some of its core attributes (like portability were NaCl to be adopted) then the whole thing is at risk of becoming pointless. At the same time, we do need to make the platform stronger and competitive in terms of speed with native as much as possible, which is a fine line.