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by bitwize 2026 days ago
The browser had an embedded JVM and applets ran right on the page. It was very similar to WebAssembly today, just a fair bit chuggier.

Two things caused people to backpedal from the applet strategy:

1) Because there was a large hiring pool of millions of fresh grads leaving college with a little Java under their belts, it having displaced C++ and Pascal as an introductory language, companies began Java projects and Java came to be seen as an enterprise language.

2) The JVM that Microsoft implemented inside IE had proprietary Microsoft extensions for greater Windows integration. Sun sued Microsoft over this, and won. After this, Sun pivoted to having Java be a browser plug-in in order to provide a consistent cross-browser experience, rather than having each browser vendor provide their own implementation. The browser plug-in was way clunkier even than the original embedded JVM was.
1 comments
Mountain_Skies 2026 days ago
The death of Microsoft's JVM is when I lost most of my interest in Java. I understand why Sun didn't want Microsoft's JVM to exist. They could see Embrace, Extend, Extinguish coming for them but wow, did Microsoft's version ever work better. I did go on to create a good bit of Java code professionally but never touched it for hobby work.

It really hurt Java in the browser when Microsoft refused to ship Sun's code with Windows. Not sure why Sun assumed that after suing Microsoft about the JVM, they'd be willing to distribute Sun's bits for them. They really seemed surprised and angry when this happened and were unprepared for it. Maybe pivoting to browser plug-ins was the only way forward they could see. Seems like the actual path forward would have been to make the Sun JVM better.

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ethbr0 2026 days ago
It was a weird time.

Now, there's a straightforward business case and examples of the many strategic and financial benefits of owning development and guidance of an open platform.

Then... you either owned a platform completely (closed) or didn't (someone else owned it). Vis: all the bs machinations around proprietary Unix distributions.

Sun + Microsoft was likely seen more in the context of "ceding ownership to Microsoft" than "growing the platform, that we still have majority ownership of."

Ultimately, hardware vs platforms thinking. Or my-share-of-zero-sum vs growing-the-market. Unfortunate.

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