There's a reason Java applets got deprecated in every browser. The runtime was inherently insecure. It just doesn't work for the web.
Also, targeting the JVM forces you to accept garbage collection, class-based OO and lots of pointer chasing. It's not a good target for most languages.
Java's pretty good, but wasm is actually a game changer.
I am a huge, huge fan of wasm. The first time I was able to compile a qt app to Linux, windows, Mac, and wasm targets, I was so tickled pick it was embarrassing. Felt like I was truly standing on the shoulders of giants and really appreciated the entirety of the whole “stack” if you will.
Running code in a browser isn’t novel. It’s very circular. I actually met someone the other day that thought JavaScript was a subset of Java. Same person was also fluent in php.
Wasm is really neat, I really love it. My cynical take on it is that, at the end of the day, it’ll just somehow help ad revenue to find another margin.
Fair. Running in the browser isn't novel, but JS/TS are some of the most popular languages in history and that almost certainly never would have happened without monopolizing the browser.
Expanding margins are fine by me. Anticompetitive markets are not. My hope is that wasm helps to break a couple strangleholds over platforms (cough cough iOS cough Android)
The Java runtime isn't any more inherently insecure than the JavaScript runtime, and JavaScript seems to work just fine for the web.
The key reason why applet security failed was because it gave you the entire JDK by default, and so every method in the JDK needed to have explicit security checking code in place to restrict access. The model was backwards -- full control by default with selective disabling meant that every new feature in the JDK is a new vulnerability.