Totally agreed. Emulating an entire x86 CPU, and booting a Linux image over the network in javascript? And it's fast enough to be completely usable? Jaw-dropping achievement.
I think that "top n" lists of things might be the 2011 web cliche of the year, but there was one gem on there that was worth the view. Check out the beercamp link (http://2011.beercamp.com/) - it does something I have never seen before. It hijacks the scroll bar and instead of a y-axis scroll, it zooms towards the center of the screen, pushing the outer elements larger and then off-screen. I just like to see examples like this that make me challenge my expectations of what an interface can be. (Not that I am an interface designer - it would be fascinating to grab a coffee with people that are and hear some other non-obvious ways of letting a viewer steer a web browser)
I'm sure we'd cry bloody murder to see this replace the "top left, scroll down" model, though.
It looks like that works by having two elements in the body, one, 'wrap', w/ position fixed and covering the screen, covering up another, 'scroll-proxy', with height 5400. They detect scroll on the proxy and use it set css transforms on elements inside 'wrap' to do the zooming effect. It is awesome how smoothly the CSS animations work.
How is gmail.com missing from this list? Before gmail you could hardly notice any email provider using XMLHTTP requests to load their mail, search, etc.
It just my opinion, but to me it's always gmail which made it a normal-everyday-thing for sites to use Javascript so tightly across browsers. And they keep adding a ton of features like automatic email update (remember the check email buttons?), dragging/sorting contacts, inline chat, etc which may appear seamless but definitely push Javascript to the limit.
I stumbled upon three.js demos when looking for Javascript plotting libs yesterday and I couldn't believe the stuff it can do rendering on a canvas. It was a big "I really underestimated Javascript" moment.
Wow, this list has both some amazing sites but also rather meh-ish sites. And also thanks for the amazing comments, there are some really cool suggestions (as the Ubuntu online demo -- never knew that existed. Thanks!)
http://bellard.org/jslinux/