[e12e]

> It worked pretty well until a major OS decided "nah, not gonna happen here".

No, it really didn't. For a time after "Java Web Start" was introduced in 2001, java had (has) a pretty decent story for distributing application (big run time dependency, problematic java updater non withstanding).

But I think the biggest problem java had/has is the mix of java being a hopelessly verbose, and arguably rather primitive language that's a bad fit for both AWT and (to a lesser degree) Swing. It's almost comical to contrast "hello world" with swing/java and with swing/jython (or jruby) - it's not that the UI toolkit is unusable, but it's not a good fit for the biggest use-case: simple business applications.

I should add that I think kotlin looks like a pretty perfect match for "the good parts of java without any added complexity".

> What's different this time?

Modern JS is arguably a better fit for simple GUI programming than modern java is.