If this is such a good and valuable idea, why will it never happen? Seems the major internet-interface makers (Google via Chrome, FB via their app, for ex), are vying for control over the way people develop web applications too. Making an alternative that gets adopted would be invaluable to them.
It won't happen because none of them will implement the other guy's new thing. Chrome would do the Google thing, Edge would do the Microsoft thing, and Firefox would sit back and balk that none of that junk is standardized. Then webdevs would just stick with Javascript and friends because it's the only thing that mostly works everywhere. That's exactly what happened to Dart, right? It had aspirations of hopping into Chrome along side JS but who else was going to put it in their browser? Now it's just another thing that compiles to Javascript because that's the only way you'd get anybody to adopt it.
You could also see it the other way around. That we've come pretty far with standardization based on JavaScript and HTML5 (and CSS and SQL and POSIX and IP ...). What do you expect exactly?
Mozilla is probably in the best position to do something. If it's good enough to get developers to switch and rave about it, ms and google will follow to keep mindshare.
JavaScript was invented by Netscape, the predecessor of Mozilla. Also Firefox came out in a phase of browser stagnation, but Chrome in particular and the other browsers are so powerful today that I'm more worried we're going to loose web standards to "whatever WebKit does". So I wouln't hold my breath.
The parent and grandparent were talking about unilaterally developed tech, "At the end of the day all it would take is one of the 3 major browser vendors to offer an alternative." etc
The correct comparison there is Dart. WebAssembly is a joint effort being developed by a team comprised of folks from every major browser vendor, so it isn't really an example of what they're talking about.
