[kalleboo]

My memory of the time (as a Mac user) was that the JVM startup time was the big killer. It took like 30-60 seconds, during which it completely froze the (cooperatively-multitasked) OS. Of course it ate up a big chunk of memory at a time when our Mac had 16-24 MB of RAM total. And Netscape 3 was unstable enough that in a decent browsing session you'd have to relaunch it 2-3 times (each time unloading the JVM). Lowering the available memory of course worsened the stability.

The applets themselves performed alright. They took a few seconds to initialize but we were used to waiting for JPEGs and hover effects to load over a 14.4 modem so that wasn't too bad relatively.