What benefit does this approach bring?<p>It reminds me of Chrome OS and Firefox OS. These all are based upon the Linux kernel, so they could potentially offer a very rich user experience like so many more traditional Linux distributions do. Yet they intentionally cripple themselves into being limited, JavaScript-only platforms.<p>This would be understandable if, say, storage space was expensive, like it was in the 1980s, and the software had to be kept lean and limited. But that's clearly not the case today, even when it comes to low-end smartphones.<p>The same goes for runtime performance. It'd be one thing if software written in JavaScript was consistently and significantly faster than software written in C, C++, and other commonly used languages. But that just isn't the case. Unless we're looking at highly tuned and highly unrealistic benchmarks that even the JavaScript VM authors have focused on making run fast, JavaScript's performance is quite bad.<p>It would be understandable if perhaps the user experience could be improved in some way by them providing superior alternatives to the traditional userland software offered by Linux distributions. Yet this isn't the case, either, because some of the biggest complaints with Chrome OS and Firefox OS are that the bundled software is awful, and users have no real recourse due to the very limited environment that both offer.<p>As far as I can tell, users just can't win with a system like this. The kernel is powerful, but this power is isolated and kept inaccessible. The userland experience is much worse than what one would get if just using a traditional Linux distro, and running the JavaScript software on top of that. The benefit to the user just isn't apparent.