You forget that at the height of the browser wars Netscape was vying with Microsoft to add new features and they didn't particularly need to be compatible; reme

You forget that at the height of the browser wars Netscape was vying with Microsoft to add new features and they didn't particularly need to be compatible; remember Javascript wasn't (initially) available on Internet Explorer, it was Netscape only for at least a year or two. I wonder that Netscape didn't add a few more languages to the party as a fire and motion exercise against the competition. The moment "does it run on IE?" became uppermost in developers minds was (as I see it) the moment the original browser wars ended and the long cold war began. But there was a cambrian explosion of often-incompatible features before that. Edit: I definitely buy that as the reason that IE didn't adopt any other languages, though, and maybe there just wasn't time for Netscape to bolt another one on? Or maybe their great rewrite got in the way (I'm hazy about the timeline for that).