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Mainly browser-vendor politics - MS/Apple/Opera/Mozilla. A proper runtime would weaken their chokehold over the Web client. It's almost certainly not a coincide
by leoc 15y ago
Mainly browser-vendor politics - MS/Apple/Opera/Mozilla. A proper runtime would weaken their chokehold over the Web client. It's almost certainly not a coincidence that the one major browser vendor which does support a VM is the one which is mainly interested in the Web client as a platform for its applications. Of the other four, two have strong interests in holding back the Web as an alternative to OS-native applications, while the remaining two are more or less nothing without their position of power over Web standards.
- ootachi 15y agoI can't figure out what you're implying. Why would the two organizations that are "more or less nothing without their position of power over Web standards" be opposed to making the Web better able to compete with native apps? After all, if the Web loses to iOS and Android, then Opera and Mozilla become irrelevant. The reason why Opera and Mozilla oppose bytecode standards is that they genuinely think they're a bad idea. I mean, we tried that once; it was called Java. It lost to JavaScript.
- georgemcbay 15y agoJava (in the browser) was a plugin that was mostly completely sandboxed from the real page DOM with its own entirely separate (and very poorly designed -- AWT was horrendous) attempt at a UI layer. That's the problem it had, not the fact that it was a byte-code based VM. Make the byte-code VM a first class citizen and things are completely different.
- deno 15y agoEven having the option to load a single JVM instance and share it between different frames/pages/tabs would be a tremendous improvement over current situation. At the present, the best you could do is to fake it using inter-frame communication (and some heuristic to elect most-likely to live longest), which is only slightly less bad.