Eich started work at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995. Eich originally joined intending to put Scheme "in the browser", but his Netscape superiors insisted that the language's syntax resemble that of Java. As a result, Eich devised a language that had much of the functionality of Scheme, the object-orientation of Self, and the syntax of Java.

From day one, Eich was told to make it "Java-like". Netscape first tried to get Java itself running in the browser, even before developing JavaScript. JavaScript looks like Java not by accident but on purpose.