[neilv]

Thank you for clarifying that.

Also, one thing less-known than that Java applets were in the popular Web browsers at one point (when JavaScript was said to be just a glue language to invoke the Java applet), was that Sun already had a richer, Java-centric Web browser, which used Java for content-type handlers. Imagine providing content as data of some type/format, and the browser would automatically download an appropriate UI for that type, on the fly, and integrate it into UI, and it would all be secure.

(I first saw Java when it was called Oak, and Sun had great people doing major things, Java only one of them. When Java applets first hit conventional Web browsers, most people thought they were for replacing animated GIFs, thanks to a demo program. I probably wrote some of the first Java desktop application code outside of Sun, partly to demonstrate that Java was a real applications development language. Well, the language was there, and in many ways a huge improvement over the C++ that most shrinkwrap and technical desktop application developers were moving to, though the library support took a while to catch up, and performance took longer.)

[iforgotpassword]

You mention it in your last sentence, but most of these tales forget to mention it at all: java was slow. I mean, slooooooooooooooow. And that reputation stuck for much longer than it was actually true. Java applets were an abomination and you wanted to repeatedly stab yourself in the head while using even a simple one. On a then-average p166 with 24mb of ram, your browser would go unresponsive while loading, jumpy mouse cursor, os starting to swap, and then some irregular annoying hangs while the GC did its thing. Not to mention how ugly awt and swing looked even back then.

Modern web is a joke regarding resource usage and complexity etc., but java was a shitshow in practice, except on beefy servers.

[0815test]

> On a then-average p166 with 24mb of ram, your browser would go unresponsive while loading, jumpy mouse cursor, os starting to swap, and then some irregular annoying hangs while the GC did its thing.

Reminds me of client-side JS frameworks. Or Electron apps.

> Not to mention how ugly awt and swing looked even back then.

Web UI is still as ugly as ever, of course. Peak UX usability was native UIs in the 1990s and early 2000s, after that it was nothing but steady decline.

[TimTheTinker]

> Reminds me of client-side JS frameworks. Or Electron apps.

Even big framework web apps on a core 2 duo running old Firefox, that is nowhere as bad as early Java trying to run something as a web applet.

I remember staring at that crazy Java applet load spinner and hating Java, and this was already in the early 2000s (on the first white iBook running Mac OS 9). It would have been much worse 7 years earlier.

It was really just the JVM’s startup time and the clunky AWT-based UI that made Java lose on web clients. Flash easily dethroned Java there because it started almost instantaneously and could do fancy animations (recall dial-up speeds meant video wasn’t an option).

[that_jojo]

Thanks for teaching me something totally unrelated on accident today. I was under the impression that all of the post-clamshell iBooks were OSX-only and had to check everymac. Now I'm slightly wiser on a topic that no one gives a shit about.

[analognoise]

"Now I'm slightly wiser on a topic that no one gives a shit about." - I'm taking this quote and integrating it into my life.

[DebtDeflation]

Who is downvoting this?

>Peak UX usability was native UIs in the 1990s and early 2000s

So much this. Give me Win2K and Office2K style applications - multiple tiled or overlapping windows, modeless views, regular menus and toolbars, context sensitive right click menus, etc. over this single pane with a hamburger button and search box crap any day of the week.

[TimTheTinker]

I’d argue that Mac OS (9/X) hit peak usability in the mid to late 2000s, when they were still trying to dethrone Windows.