See my proposal for an implementation in JS of the Safe librairies and the idea of having bridges between the native network and the web-based one. The existence of a working implementation of bittorrent using web technologies shows it is possible, and since it is based on a similar XOR-based Distributed Hash Table implementation there is probably a fair amount of code from webtorrent that can be reused.
In both cases, a web-based implementation allows non-technical users to use the technology without having to install anything on their computer. They can participate simply by visiting a link in their browser. It removes any friction in the deployment of the technology.
@dyamanaka: I just discovered node-webkit which combines Chromium, the open source part of the Chrome browser, and node, the JS-based runtime, to write cross platform applications using web technologies, extended with the capabilities of the node librairies, that go beyond the current API available in web browsers.
It means we could have a web-based client node for new users, and a native application that would act both as a web-based client and a native client, therefore bridging both network. Finally, we could have nodes (without a UI) for farmers to deploy on many machines. By exposing the SAFE librairies to nodeJS, we could use JavaScript as a scripting language in all cases, which would allow a lot more developers to create mashups for any or all of these implementations.