One of the biggest impediments was that Microsoft had this crappy implementation of Java on IE that was simply useless. Making a portable (modern at the time) a

One of the biggest impediments was that Microsoft had this crappy implementation of Java on IE that was simply useless. Making a portable (modern at the time) applet that worked in IE was essentially impossible. I have no doubt MS did that on purpose. All said, I think having a standardized binary ASM model in the browser is the right way to go, even if it is a couple decades later :)