[flormmm]

Applets were a grand idea and probably responsible for spawning other (more usable) tech in this space. Or at least showing people what was possible.

Of course they sadly ended as a staggering failure.

Epic loading times of the JVM were the practical death knell. A grand-canyon of a security hole was the deal sealer.

[saurik]

Engh. What I'd say really killed Java Applets was that Sun disliked Microsoft giving developers Win32 API access in their JVM (due to fears that people could then theoretically create non-portable "Java" programs) enough to sue them to prevent them from using the technology going forward, leaving the at-the-time most widely-deployed browser, Internet Explorer, forever stuck with a broken stack that was only compatible with the rapidly-limiting Java 1.1 unless the user went out of their way to install what I remember being a little-known and rather finicky package from Sun. In the mean time, Flash stepped in with a runtime that was equally supported on every then-major browser, which had a great IDE, and which was maybe even less complex to install (but certainly no more complex).

[ams6110]

Not to mention less secure (speaking of Flash)