We need a standard wire format for code to be run on browsers. Fortunately we have one: it's called JavaScript. If you look at the internals of that format, it happens to be designed to be written directly by humans, but if you find that design suboptimal (and it would be surprising if it wasn't, considering it was put together on a ten day deadline with contradictory requirements) you can ignore it and just treat it as object code to which your favorite language can be compiled.
Doesn't Google make some internal use of a tool chain that compiles Java to JavaScript? And then of course there's Dart and CoffeeScript. I'm sure there'll be more.