The language that made it normal to blindly run code that you found lying around on some page? Elsewhere we'd call that a remote code execution exploit. JavaScript just calls it another day at the office.

And it's not fully sandboxed. It betrays its user all the time by abusing unrestricted access to the network, or activating browser functionality that most of us would disable if we could.

I'm not saying it's THE bad decision, but it is the product of a generation of thinkers who were not thinking about threats the way we do now. If we were to go back in time and have the opportunity to do it differently, I think we would take that opportunity.

But we don't actually need a time machine. We can just accept some sunk costs and move forward anyhow.

To be fair, Java applets and the Flash plugin socialized that before Javascript tried to walk us back from the edge just a bit.

And before that, whatever Microsoft "macro" or embedded code variant was popular that week in all those document formats...

Blindly running client side code (within a very carefully designed sandbox) is necessary for the modern web to operate, and people like the modern web.

We aren't going back to a page refresh every time you want to update something any time soon