I don’t think your reading of history is correct at all. There were plenty of attempts to unseat JS in the browser - ActiveX, Flash, Java, Dart.
Only Google attempted it with Dart, and then they got tired and gave up, because the team was (presumably) minuscule compared to the team working on JavaScript in the same effing browser.
Funnily enough it was the same team! Lars Bak led a small team to build V8, and then when that was a big success, he had enough clout within Google to design a new language that could improve on JS, so he took most of the same team and they created Dart.
ActiveX, Flash, and Java all supplemented Javascript. none attempted to replace it. they all did things that could not be done with Javascript at the time.
only Dart attempted to replace it.
> Lars Bak led a small team to build V8, and then when that was a big success, he had enough clout within Google to design a new language that could improve on JS, so he took most of the same team and they created Dart.
How many people (original team or not) continued to work on V8? I don't know, but it felt like Dart had about 5% of the workforce that V8 did. If so, there was little chance they could have ever caught up to V8 on any measure in the short time Dart existed in Chrome as a DOM-manipulating scripting language.
Only Google attempted it with Dart, and then they got tired and gave up, because the team was (presumably) minuscule compared to the team working on JavaScript in the same effing browser.
Funnily enough it was the same team! Lars Bak led a small team to build V8, and then when that was a big success, he had enough clout within Google to design a new language that could improve on JS, so he took most of the same team and they created Dart.