[donatj]

Rose tinted glasses I suspect. Don’t forget in the 90s the average desktop wasn’t powerful enough to run Java at a decent speed and the JVM startup time was in the tens of seconds.

It’s never told as such, but having been around at the time I suspect JS came to be largely from Java’s lackluster performance.

I’d go so far as to say if the web had depended on client side Java it may never have taken off.

[commandlinefan]

> Java’s lackluster performance

It also had to do with Java's availability being hit or miss - a lot of times, you'd have to jump through some hoops to enable Java support, whereas Javascript always worked.

[abraxas]

JS before V8 was painfully slow. But yeah the startup times of Applets were an issue on a whole another level. I'm glad we have WASM now so maybe powerful and clean languages for coding web UI will be in our future.