Completely agreed. Problem is while you're exploring to find the correct dimensional reduction / chuckout strategy, you're typically rapidly scanning through lots of scatter plots / density plots / whatever in grids and my experience is that the browser and javascript don't cut it here for reasons of throughput. If it's not the DOM that's blocking things, it's the commmunication channel to the browser that is too slow, and you can't dump all your data into the browser to avoid the communication slowness, because it then chokes. Chrome will barely allow a JS object a mere gig in size. Firefox dies well before that. This is not to say that we're not moving in the right direction on javascript/browser-based exploration, just that for now it's premature. BTW I'm succesfully using Jupyter (ipython notebook) as a hybrid solution. Bit of a best of both worlds. But then we're no longer talking JS for the graphics.
