>>25
There have been efforts to fix this--Flash, Java applets, and Silverlight, which will still always be the tools of choice for demanding web applications.
Java is a joke on the web, only worth considering for
ENTERPRISE bullshit where users are forced to use your app no matter how awful it is. It has literally no advantages. (If you think downloading and parsing JavaScript is slow, try downloading a JAR, firing up a JVM and running the bytecode verifier.)
Flash's performance advantages are mostly from hardware acceleration (now a moot point as every major web browser has that natively) and a more efficient JIT. And on the JIT front the difference is narrowing as browser vendors spend more time optimizing JS engines and new APIs are added for stuff that's inherently slow in JS: typed arrays, ImageData, etc. Turns out you can get quite decent performance without introducing the kind of pig disgusting Javaisms that Adobe added to ActionScript.
Can't say much about Silverlight except that its mobile support is even worse than Java and Flash so you'd have to be crazy to use it in a frontend web app.
IHBT