[AndrewStephens]

Sun seemed to have a real mental block when it came to applets - people screamed at them for years about performance and they refused to do anything about it. Indeed, in 1995 the simpliest applet would take several seconds to appear. In 2005 (about the time everyone stopped caring), the same applet would take ... several seconds to appear. They never got faster even as CPUs improved by several hundred percent.

The Applets ran fast enough (even on 1995 machines) once loaded, at least fast enough to be useful. But that delay at startup when your CPU went to 100% and your hard drive buzzed away, freezing everything else you machine was doing, just killed any interest the public had in using applets.

Part of the problem is that they JIT'ed everything without caching it and that included the standard Java libraries. So every applet started to execute, called some standard API, the API was JIT'ed, that called some other part of the API which was JIT'ed, etc, etc. I could never understand why they didn't compile at least the standard libraries on install or first use and save the result.

[ethbr0]

From everything I've touched Sun was always very... Unix in regards to UX.

As in "Well, just learn to deal with it. And be grateful you have a graphical interface at all."

Making things better, or pushing the state of graphical presentation art never seemed to even be a core interest, much less competency.

Which is ironic, because a lot of that organizational choice seems reflected in Java, e.g. having to boil the ocean and re-implement everything for major arch changes.

[smm11]

Sun briefly toyed with OpenStep, or essentially the UI of the NeXT machines that morphed into today Apple's OS X interface.

Anything would have been better than CDE or OpenWindows at the time, and the NeXT GUI was quite innovative in the 90s.

[DonHopkins]

I always thought JIT should be spelled JATWPT, for Just At The Worst Possible Time (when the user's waiting for the app to start up).

[lenkite]

This was deliberate - they were afraid Java would become too popular on the browser side and people would stop buying their heavyweight servers. They always pushed Java as the server side language. If they wanted Java at the client side - they wanted pure Java clients (webstart, etc) not browsers hosting Java applets. Browsers hosting Java applets were sneered upon.

JS eventually won the game here after IE advanced Web 1.0 with great support for AJAX, etc.

The funny thing is that if Sun was on the ball and didn't abandon HotJava, your modern day browser would have been a Java app.

[anthk]

>your modern day browser would have been a Java app.

Not so distant to J2ME browsers like Opera Mini, and today with Android I am not sure. Chrome is C++, but on Android everything gets blurred.

[pram]

Yeah I dunno about that. HotJava was aggressively awful to use.

[AndrewStephens]

I agree. One of the many, many, many areas where Sun dropped the ball was the failure to implement a good HTML control in Java. HotJava was very basic.

[lolive]

I think they still have the problem today. Which makes any JVM language to be slow to run in elastic environments (where hardware instances and server runs quickly come and go depending on the load).