hmm
Oh wow I can't wait to expose my hardware even more directly to code living out on the intertubes.
The latest version of the Unity cross-platform game development toolkit is helping to bring advanced 3D graphics and gaming to the web, albeit in baby steps. Unity 5, released to coincide with the Game Developers Conference taking place in San Francisco this week, includes a preview version of an exporter for WebGL, an …
I understood it be a compiled subset of JS which means it should be able to run in the browser's VM like any other JIT code.
I could be wrong.
Games are the obvious way to gain attention, but I'd imagine the real use is to reduce latency for things like google docs.
Could it replace plugins for things like citrix?
You understand correctly.
Asm.js code is just JS code. It does not gain any additional access to your browser/hardware than a normal web page. There's no additional security risk in running it.
Google has tweaked their Javascript for performance and the other browsers (at least notably Firefox and Chrome) have tuned their engines to run gmail and docs code as fast as possible. Asm.js code won't be as noticeable/appreciated in something like an office suite as it is in very high performance situations like those that manipulate (or generate) graphics, such as image editors, audio editors and games.
Asm.js could be used in replacing a desktop virtualization client like Citrix, but something like WebRTC which is well suited to directly streaming video between two points would play a particularly significant role. (I'm, however, uncertain about the high performance mechanics necessary for a desktop virtualization client beyond video streaming part.)
"Microsoft has said it plans to include asm.js optimizations in future versions of Internet Explorer"
I thought they'd decided to kill off IE?