If you're interested in the full history, watch Crockford's Your New Overlord talk. He explains that Sun wanted JavaScript gone, but they had to keep it, becaus

If you're interested in the full history, watch Crockford's Your New Overlord talk. He explains that Sun wanted JavaScript gone, but they had to keep it, because it was the only way for Java to talk to the DOM at the time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trurfqh_6fQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trurfqh_6fQ As for Apple not seeing JavaScript as a threat... that's quite the understatement. Everyone seems to have forgotten that Steve Jobs actually went on stage and declared that Web Apps were the way you would develop apps for the iPhone, in 100% JavaScript. This was almost a year before the App Store and the Cocoa Touch SDK. Nobody really believed him at the time, but it was in line with what they'd been doing. If you look at Safari's evolution on the desktop, there was a ridiculous performance boost with Safari 3. Incidentally, this was during the same time they would've been developing the iPhone's browser. At the same time they started doing things like CSS animations, CSS transitions, CSS 3D (which was first available on iOS, not on the desktop), all technologies that are required to bring an Apple/Cocoa-like experience to web apps. That's not a coincidence. Someone who worked at Apple told me that, in fact, Steve Jobs wasn't entirely lying. They did believe web apps were the future. But they simply couldn't deliver on it, and even today, native mobile apps still have a huge lead over web.