I'd like a distributed app VM that's completely separated from the browser. Every time I think about this, I'm brought back around to this thought: why not java

I'd like a distributed app VM that's completely separated from the browser. Every time I think about this, I'm brought back around to this thought: why not java? Minecraft was a good proof of concept and it shows you can make a complex distributed application using java. So why are we tethering ourselves needlessly to the browser?