Gregory's Server@brion @mcc I'm pretty sure that Mozilla at least were already thinking about asm.js, which was later replaced by WebAssembly. They're pretty good at pushing the platform forward in ways that look like really weird choices when examined as piecemeal changes but make a lot of sense in the context of the whole.
@brion @mcc Also FWIW there was precedent in ActionScript 3, which adopted a similar design for Molehill/Stage3D, and remember AS3 was going to form the basis of ES4 until Microsoft nixed it. And AS3 had a bytecode VM, which would have been included in browsers as part of ES4.
(In hindsight I'm glad we got ES6 and WebASM instead but that's where a lot of these things originate.)