Comment Re:Here's a FAQ for slashdotters (Score 2) 126
Point B: When Java was added to HTML, everyone and his dog (including Microsoft) thought that Java was the future and that every software in the world would have been rewritten in Java. Proof in the fact that the "Java" branding was added to Javascript in order to increase its appeal.
Point C: the sandbox for Java applets gave the unsigned ones even fewer permissions than the current Javascript sandbox does for the most obscure of the web pages.
Point D: Compilers have been written targeting the JVM bytecode for pretty much every modern language (Python, Ruby, Scala, Lisp and, of course, Javascript), many of them actually faster than their reference C implementations, so I don't know how much lower in level you can get.
Point E: Look, DOM manipulation from an applet. And do you know what else integrated even more with the DOM? Microsoft's ActiveX.
But above all, all points, even if they were true, are but minor differences in implementation, compared to the huge fact being the very nature of a bytecode that is supposed to be run by web pages, that alters the open nature of the web by making its pages write-only, and the introduction of a compiler into the workflow of HTML development. (Who will make the better compiler, Microsoft or Mozilla? Will php scripts output bytecode or do we have to change server-side scripting? What's the failure model for browsers implementing an older subset of the bytecodes?)