GUADEC: Luis Villa points GNOME at the web

ActionScript is (a form of) JavaScript, so you seem to be complaining more about browser implementations of JavaScript, or the DOM, than the language itself, which is used outside the browser as well, with some success. AJAX is a huge phenomenon that has revolutionised web applications.

As for 'slow' - there's a lot of work on JavaScript performance using JITs, which has resulted in some significant gains: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000509.html. There is intense competition between iOS and Android in this area as well: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/07/android-22-de...