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Sure it does. Why did they want a higher performance JS VM for the browser? The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was

Sure it does. Why did they want a higher performance JS VM for the browser? The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java. A high performance JS VM means we don't need to use applets anymore.

danieldk 9y ago
By the early years of Google applets were already pretty much dead: https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076251/core-java/applets--still-essential-to-java.html https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076251/core-java/applets-... (Note that the article is from 2000.) Remember that Google was already doing AJAX in Gmail in 2004, years before V8.
- gsnedders 9y ago
  And V8 was first released in 2008. Java applets were pretty much completely gone from the web by this point. The only competition on the web, from plugins, at that point was Flash (okay, Silverlight deserves a footnote, but little more).
  - adamrezich 9y ago
    V8 is ten years old?! How time flies...
    - vanderZwan 9y ago
      I have the opposite response: only a decade old? Same with YouTube actually, I can't really remember what the Web was like without video streaming
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - icebraining 9y ago
        There was streaming before. You installed Real Player so you couBuffering...
r00fus 9y ago
> The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java. I find this amusing. No one ever built anything meaningful client-side with Java. There's a reason Microsoft laughed off Java as "write once, debug many".
- janoc 9y ago
  Um Eclipse? Netbeans? ArgoUML? (just out of top of my head). Your statement would be true if you have said "anything meaningful client-side on the web with Java". On the web Java was restricted to Java applets and was never really in competition with JavaScript. Desktop is quite another story.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    Agreed, my context was browser specific applets. Clearly Java has some moderate success on the desktop. I do think Sun entertained Java superseding Javascript in the browser - it just didn't work out that way.
- admax88q 9y ago
  Java applets were huge, and still are quite big in enterprise.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    Where? We're not talking servlets or EJBs here right? Adoption across combination of OS & browser was and continues to be an issue. Both Microsoft and Apple made it difficult in different ways, and the "year of linux on the desktop" has yet to really come (no ChromeOS don't count)
    - ben509 9y ago
      "Adoption across combination of OS & browser" Not a problem when everyone is using Windows and Netscape. It's as horrible as you'd think.
simias 9y ago
Not Flash? In my experience Java applets never got anywhere close to the level of adoption of Flash. I suppose it might've been different in corporate environments. I had Flash enabled in my browser long after I stopped using Java applets altogether, if only for video streaming.
- protomyth 9y ago
  Corporate environments were different (easy was to expose Java business program to user without hiring Web people), but the doom of Java in the browser was the whole applet concept and not the DOM integration that JavaScript had. It might have been quite a difference if the JVM could have controlled the webpage like JavaScript.
AceJohnny2 9y ago
This is ignorant. The rise of Javascript had little to nothing to do with the fall of Java applets, which failed due to their own issues. Java applets were already considered a dying tech when Google made their push to heavily-Javascript-dependent apps, and the performance requirements that led to. Note also that despite the similar name, Javascript and Java have technically nothing to do with each other. It is a quirk of business history [1] that Netscape and Sun partnered to name Javascript as it is when Sun was first pushing Java as a web technology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Beginnings_at_Netscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Beginnings_at_Netsc...
- shagie 9y ago
  The original use of JavaScript was to pass DOM information to the applet and back. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/invokingJavaScriptFromApplet.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in... and https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/invokingAppletMethodsFromJavaScript.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in... are the docs for this largely forgotten functionality.
  - ben509 9y ago
    There was no DOM back in the early days of Javascript. The page was rendered in a single pass, you could inject text and markup via document.write() and anything "dynamic" was accomplished by reloading an IFRAME. Remember, these were the days when too many tables would crash your browser; I recall the early demos of Gecko showing deeply nested tables, and all styling was with font tags still. Netscape was still trying to sell a browser, and they wanted a common language on the frontend and backend, so Javascript was also on Netscape Server.
    - shagie 9y ago
      Maybe the 'DOM' wasn't the right word choice. However, in 1995 one could foo = document.getElementById and foo.innerHTML as described in https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/invokingJavaScriptFromApplet.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in... It was possible to call JavaScript from a Java applet and method in a Java applet from JavaScript (on a web page). This functionality can be seen in Java 2 (now known as Java 1.2) - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/basics-137133.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/basics-137133.html . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_(web_browser)#Release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_(web_browser)#Release... has JavaScript and Java as part of the same release for Netscape. The next release of Netscape Navigator (3.0) had LiveConnect version 1 ( http://web.mit.edu/javascript/src/mozilla/js/src/liveconnect/README.html http://web.mit.edu/javascript/src/mozilla/js/src/liveconnect... ) which was that cross language communication. I would be willing to contend that in the view of "Java applets are where the web is going" back then, the difficulty of communication between the applet and the enclosing page was something that needed some scripting glue and that JavaScript, from its inception, was to be that glue. It took about a year to get it working, but this was the initial goal of JavaScript.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java. Actually, Java was already mostly dead for the public web when Chrome and V8 were being developed, it was more Flash that was the competition.
paulie_a 9y ago
Sorry, but for the web java applets were never viable and universally complete garbage.

danieldk 9y ago

By the early years of Google applets were already pretty much dead: https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076251/core-java/applets--still-essential-to-java.html https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076251/core-java/applets-... (Note that the article is from 2000.) Remember that Google was already doing AJAX in Gmail in 2004, years before V8.

gsnedders 9y ago
And V8 was first released in 2008. Java applets were pretty much completely gone from the web by this point. The only competition on the web, from plugins, at that point was Flash (okay, Silverlight deserves a footnote, but little more).
- adamrezich 9y ago
  V8 is ten years old?! How time flies...
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    I have the opposite response: only a decade old? Same with YouTube actually, I can't really remember what the Web was like without video streaming
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - icebraining 9y ago
      There was streaming before. You installed Real Player so you couBuffering...

r00fus 9y ago

> The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java. I find this amusing. No one ever built anything meaningful client-side with Java. There's a reason Microsoft laughed off Java as "write once, debug many".

janoc 9y ago
Um Eclipse? Netbeans? ArgoUML? (just out of top of my head). Your statement would be true if you have said "anything meaningful client-side on the web with Java". On the web Java was restricted to Java applets and was never really in competition with JavaScript. Desktop is quite another story.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Agreed, my context was browser specific applets. Clearly Java has some moderate success on the desktop. I do think Sun entertained Java superseding Javascript in the browser - it just didn't work out that way.
admax88q 9y ago
Java applets were huge, and still are quite big in enterprise.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Where? We're not talking servlets or EJBs here right? Adoption across combination of OS & browser was and continues to be an issue. Both Microsoft and Apple made it difficult in different ways, and the "year of linux on the desktop" has yet to really come (no ChromeOS don't count)
  - ben509 9y ago
    "Adoption across combination of OS & browser" Not a problem when everyone is using Windows and Netscape. It's as horrible as you'd think.

simias 9y ago

Not Flash? In my experience Java applets never got anywhere close to the level of adoption of Flash. I suppose it might've been different in corporate environments. I had Flash enabled in my browser long after I stopped using Java applets altogether, if only for video streaming.

protomyth 9y ago
Corporate environments were different (easy was to expose Java business program to user without hiring Web people), but the doom of Java in the browser was the whole applet concept and not the DOM integration that JavaScript had. It might have been quite a difference if the JVM could have controlled the webpage like JavaScript.

AceJohnny2 9y ago

This is ignorant. The rise of Javascript had little to nothing to do with the fall of Java applets, which failed due to their own issues. Java applets were already considered a dying tech when Google made their push to heavily-Javascript-dependent apps, and the performance requirements that led to. Note also that despite the similar name, Javascript and Java have technically nothing to do with each other. It is a quirk of business history [1] that Netscape and Sun partnered to name Javascript as it is when Sun was first pushing Java as a web technology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Beginnings_at_Netscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Beginnings_at_Netsc...

shagie 9y ago
The original use of JavaScript was to pass DOM information to the applet and back. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/invokingJavaScriptFromApplet.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in... and https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/invokingAppletMethodsFromJavaScript.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in... are the docs for this largely forgotten functionality.
- ben509 9y ago
  There was no DOM back in the early days of Javascript. The page was rendered in a single pass, you could inject text and markup via document.write() and anything "dynamic" was accomplished by reloading an IFRAME. Remember, these were the days when too many tables would crash your browser; I recall the early demos of Gecko showing deeply nested tables, and all styling was with font tags still. Netscape was still trying to sell a browser, and they wanted a common language on the frontend and backend, so Javascript was also on Netscape Server.
  - shagie 9y ago
    Maybe the 'DOM' wasn't the right word choice. However, in 1995 one could foo = document.getElementById and foo.innerHTML as described in https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/invokingJavaScriptFromApplet.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in... It was possible to call JavaScript from a Java applet and method in a Java applet from JavaScript (on a web page). This functionality can be seen in Java 2 (now known as Java 1.2) - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/basics-137133.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/basics-137133.html . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_(web_browser)#Release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_(web_browser)#Release... has JavaScript and Java as part of the same release for Netscape. The next release of Netscape Navigator (3.0) had LiveConnect version 1 ( http://web.mit.edu/javascript/src/mozilla/js/src/liveconnect/README.html http://web.mit.edu/javascript/src/mozilla/js/src/liveconnect... ) which was that cross language communication. I would be willing to contend that in the view of "Java applets are where the web is going" back then, the difficulty of communication between the applet and the enclosing page was something that needed some scripting glue and that JavaScript, from its inception, was to be that glue. It took about a year to get it working, but this was the initial goal of JavaScript.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java. Actually, Java was already mostly dead for the public web when Chrome and V8 were being developed, it was more Flash that was the competition.

paulie_a 9y ago

Sorry, but for the web java applets were never viable and universally complete garbage.