Since the original intention was for Java to be available to any application, not just the browser, the VM should ultimately be available as an operating system driver (as it already is in OS/2 Warp). Sun addressed this last year with the release of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), which contains everything necessary to execute Java code (the VM and class libraries). Once JRE is loaded onto your system, any application can embed Java objects just like a browser. The problem is that the browsers were still using their own hard-coded versions of the VM and had no mechanism for accessing JRE.