It was the first browser to support Java applets, and was Sun's demonstration platform for the then-new technology.

[4] In 1994, a team of Oak/Java developers started writing WebRunner, which was a clone of the web browser Mosaic.

[5] The official Java name was adopted a year later in 1995 when Sun decided to make Oak public and integrate it with the web.

WebRunner's first public demonstration was given by John Gage and James Gosling at the Technology Entertainment Design Conference in Monterey, California in 1995.

More critically, HotJava suffered from the inherent performance limitations of Java virtual machine implementations of the day (both in terms of processing speed and memory consumption) and hence was considerably sluggish.