>It smells a bit like embrace-extend-exterminate to me, even if it's not intentional, it currently is a natural consequence of "claim to do X in a browser" without access to the underlying primitives necessary to do X in a standards-compliant manner.

Sure, so don't support it. If no one supports the protocol or the app, then it will die. That's an acceptable outcome to some. I'm not saying anyone has to support it, I don't even have any vested interest in it. It's just an interesting project and I've spent far too long today on HackerNews defending it when I could be working on my own projects.

To me, it looks more like "Adding Bittorrent into Firefox is pretty much impossible, where can we start instead?"

>In my opinion browsers need to provide thinner abstractions over posix apis (with the appropriate sandboxing and opt-in where necessary).

NaCl & Emscripten should get you some of the way there.