Re:The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]
by Yorrrick on Friday April 18, 2014 @10:13AM
(#7609182)
The "necessity" of those extensions is debatable, and they meant that code wouldn't be portable to Sun's implementation. There was real cause for concern, and there weren't a lot of other options for fixing it.
Sun probably also realized that they weren't about to compete directly with mighty Microsoft on platform lockin of all things, so they played a different game.
Even stranger is how Sun, a hardware/platform company, decided making a popular platform that's hardware and platform independent would help their business. Sometimes I wonder if there was a really well thought-out plan, or people were just doing things.