In some scenarios (e.g. CI servers) having a browser available to run Selenium in is as much or more of a "hoop to jump through" as having Node available. Given that the vast majority of patches/contributors to Django don't touch JS at all, "install Node" seems to me like a reasonable pre-requisite for those few that do (installing Node is not hard.) Firing up Selenium in a browser is much slower, and irritating for rapid TDD. Plus, if we have JS unit tests as proposed here, they can still be run in a browser when desired, but we also have the option to run them very quickly via command-line; the best of both worlds. For anyone for whom installing Node is a major barrier, they could just load up the test HTML file in a browser and run it that way.