That’s a misreading of history. Here’s the announcement for JavaScript, which wa...

moritzwarhier · on July 20, 2023

Even assuming JS that was originally meant for hover effects (or "rollover") and other "light animation", complex web applications predate React by a lot.

Think Outlook Web, Google Maps, and all the smaller apps built with frameworks of their time such as Dojo, YUI etc

There also are monstrosities with the server at the center...

applications with hundreds of hidden form fields per page, required server sessions for anonymous users, DSLs in half-baked server-side templating languages, server code generating and injecting opaque JS to sync state with the client, the list goes on.

And these things all have ups and downs themselves I guess, just like React has.

In fact animation is one of my least favorite uses of JS, the more I can do in CSS, the better.

As a user sometimes I enjoy complex animations but only when it serves a purpose.

toyg · on July 20, 2023

Those applications were meant to run on the server, more precisely on the Netscape proprietary appserver. On the browser they were meant to do popups and basic form validation at best. There was not even a network communication mechanism!

doctor_eval · on July 20, 2023

This is not what was intended. Just read the 1995 announcement - straight from the horse’s mouth. It was clear that Netscape had big plans for this. JS had its limitations, sure, but it could talk to Java on the client - which certainly did have network access. And famously, Microsoft felt so threatened by this new “platform” that they feared it would make Windows redundant. The late 90s was a wild ride.

> JavaScript is an easy-to-use object scripting language designed for creating live online applications that link together objects and resources on both clients and servers. While Java is used by programmers to create new objects and applets, JavaScript is designed for use by HTML page authors and enterprise application developers to dynamically script the behavior of objects running on either the client or the server. JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications.

toyg · on July 20, 2023

You just have to read that to see how JS was just meant as a bit of glue between JDK and html pages. Java would do the heavy lifting everywhere.

doctor_eval · on July 21, 2023

Yes but you understand that the JDK was running in the browser, right?

The browser has been an app platform since Netscape developed plugins. That is my whole point.

toyg · on July 23, 2023

But Netscape didn't create Java. The browser was not created to be an application runtime; commercial interests shoehorned the role onto it.

doctor_eval · on July 23, 2023

> But Netscape didn't create Java

So what? They didn't invent HTML either.

> The browser was not created to be an application runtime

It's been 35 years since HTML was invented, and 30 years since Netscape was released. There have been dozens - or maybe even hundreds - of browsers written in that time. So when you say, "the browser was not created to be an application runtime", really, I don't even know what that means. Which browser? Amaya? Arena? Lynx? Mosaic? Netscape? IE? IE6? Webkit? Blink?

"The browser" was created to be whatever their creators wanted it to be. Netscape, for better or worse, wanted it to be an application platform. And, to their credit, they were right.

toyg · on July 23, 2023

> So what? They didn't invent HTML either.

Exactly. They fucked up something that someone else had thought up.

> when you say, "the browser was not created to be an application runtime", really, I don't even know what that means. Which browser?

Pretty much none of them, except maybe IE (WebKit and Blink are not browsers, they are rendering engines, btw). Some were thought for read-write capabilities in pages (Amaya and to a degree the original Netscape suite with their built-in editor), but that's basically it. Netscape pivoted this and that way, as scrappy startups are wont to do, following random partnerships or shipping their own suite, until they were acquired by AOL. Whatever they say, they really had no big design; they just threw the kitchen sink at something they thought would be cool. It just so happened that eventually Apple and Google figured that the JS/HTML coupling made for their best bet to break Microsoft's dominance in the application space, and started throwing engineers at it. Without that move, JS would still be the rollover trick-pony that it was in the early '00s, with the wonky inconsistent syntax and horrendous performance.

The one browser that was really thought of as a runtime was basically IE, with ActiveX and its deep embedding into Windows. That was a bad idea and it rightly ended like it did.