[ojosilva]

The JVM wasn't a thing you "targeted" until much later. In 1996 there was java and javac. People were ecstatic running the same programs written in Java on every architecture (SPARC, PowerPC, Itanium, 8086...), and even as a client or as a web applet. The "portability" wars of 80s and early 90s were over (that's where C and C++ were born into). Nobody really talked about JVM, because there was basically 1 Java vm, no HotSpot or OpenJDK and no real bytecode documentation. JS was not planned for the JVM. So much that there wasn't even a half decent JS to JVM compiler implementation until recently. JS was a joke until ES3, and a very subpar environment until v8 got fast, Node got serious and TC39 got their shit together after the ES4 clusterfuck.

If the Java@Netscape story came about earlier than 1995 then maybe yes, the JVM could have made into the browser as THE scripting environment for an eventual JavaScript language, because Java the language was not suited for webpage designers to throw something together un a highly evente environment. The browser was the place to be and Java just didn't make it there (they fought hard though with their applet crap).