[cabalamat]

They were essentially the same idea as WASM -- a portable machine code that runs on web browsers -- but a quarter of a century earlier.

I suspect Java applets fell out of fashion because they could only manipulate a rectangular area of the screen and not the DOM. Did the DOM even exist in 1995?

[vbezhenar]

The problem with Java was flawed sandbox implementation. Every month there was escape sandbox vulnerability. People didn't keep their JVMs up to date. Installing JVM plugin for browser, between x86, amd64 Edge, IE, with multiple JVMs on the machine, was a holy mess.

So in the end it was security nightmare.

Jobs finally killed it, by declining to support Java on iPhones. So from that point it was doomed.

WASM is part of the browser. Browser vendors figured out how to keep their browsers evergreen. You don't need to install anything, it just works. It works on iPhones.

So, yes, idea was the same, but implementation was actually good and supported by everyone.

[unscaled]

The vulnerabilities and constant updates where the final straw that killed Java applets, since they convinced browsers that the unpopular Java applets plugin was a liability more than an asset. Java's security story was broken from day 1, but back when Java applets were trying to gain a mindshare security awareness just not there, and almost-weekly nag screens asking you to update your JRE were not a thing yet.

It's also not the fact that users rejected the idea of apps that are restricted to a rectangle inside the web browser - after all, Flash and even ActiveX (to a limited degree) managed to churn out popular apps running inside a (badly) sandboxed rectangle. Some of the popular use cases (e.g. games) did not die, and are now faithfully served by WASM. Rectangle-constrained applets are obviously not good for every use case, but Java applets failed to succeed even at the places where Flash shined later.

Looking back, I think what killed Java applets was that they were just slow, ugly, hard to interact with and had bad developer experience. Developing HTML pages was easy - just a change/reload cycle. The same goes for cgi-bin scripts. Java applets required compilation, packaging and then testing, at the time when automated building tools were not there. IDEs with RAD designers that tried to improve the experience did come, but at least most Java IDEs I tried back then were quite cumbersome to use compared to incumbent native RAD tools like Delphi or Visual Basic.

In addition to that, Java applet support was initially spotty during the browser wars, and features such as JAR files and different JDK 1.1 (and later JDK 1.2) APIs were not evenly supported across Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer[1]: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2076251/applets--still-ess...

And then there's the slowness and ugliness. You really only had AWT available for your UI and graphics, and it sucked. It was ugly, buggy and slow. In theory, it shouldn't have been so, but the technology just wasn't ready and just wasn't mature enough.

I think Flash was so wildly successful because it took an entirely different (and less ambitious) route at the beginning. Flash started as a multimedia player with user-friendly authoring tools. They later added ActionScript and Flash itself become the RAD tool that could penetrate the web frontend.

[panick21_]

Ease of development and speed of loading really makes a difference.

I remember just sitting around looking at these Java Applets loading whole applications. While Flash games were snappy.

The moment you hit some webpage and it shows you a Java Applet loading bar you knew the website was useless basically.

I think this had quite a bit to with Java and the way it implemented UIs. Also just serving a whole bunch of unnecessary stuff. To be fair this eventually became an issue with JS as well, but not the the same degree compared to the network speed.

[pmontra]

They fell out of fashion because you had to install JRE on the client machines and because they ended up with an icon in the Windows task bar that obnoxiously asked again and again to download a 100+ MB update week after week. Internet was slow, still a lot of 56 kbps modems, and many people never upgraded and ended up hating the experience. Flash was better looking and they had a much compelling reason to download it, games.

[mynameishere]

No, Applets were just clunky and slow-loading--that's why they weren't popular. Any website loading one would freeze up the whole machine. But there were definitely Java Applet games, and I happen to remember the last one I ever played: Minecraft.

Flash loaded quickly and seamlessly, but otherwise had all the same problems.

[amlib]

Damn, I remember playing creative minecraft back in 2010, a surprisingly good experience for a java applet embedded in the browser. All running on linux with fairly smooth opengl rendering. I also remember using a wrapper/front-end called world of minecraft that allowed you to run the jar outside of the browser and even had multiplayer support...

[andai]

Does anyone know why applets loaded so slowly and flash loaded so fast?

[Sharlin]

Not only that, but they were notoriously vulnerable to attacks.

[nohuck13]

Nope, at least not as a standard. The original DOM spec is dated 1 October 1998.

https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001/

[shiomiru]

Notably though, in 1997 Netscape 4 already had document.layers and IE4 document.all, two incompatible precursors to the DOM.

Some info about the LAYER API (which Netscape eventually killed, as the MS/W3C DOM prevailed):

http://web.archive.org/web/19971015223701/http://developer.n...

Also, a DOM compatibility guide can be found here:

http://www.dannyg.com/dl/JSB4RefPoster.pdf

[bowsamic]

I think in the end they were basically replaced by Flash and Shockwave, which were much easier to use for what most people were using Java applets for. Then, of course, Flash was abandoned because Adobe, being Adobe, seemed to absolutely refuse to fix many of the huge security issues that Flash had. Steve Jobs then led the fight against Flash, and that basically leaves us at today.

Remember that even after JS was released it still took many years until it became fast enough to use for big applications. If I'm not wrong, Google Chrome was made partly with the explicit goal to have super fast JS.

Also no the DOM did not exist until 1998.

[andsoitis]

> Did the DOM even exist in 1995?

While the limited facilities provided in the first generation of JavaScript and JScript for detecting events and manipulating HTML elements eventually came to be known as "DOM Level 0", it wasn't until 1998 that the first DOM specification was published. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Object_Model

[andylynch]

It was also because they were slow to load, and especially because unlike flash targeting newer Java plugins was painful and unreliable.

[beebeepka]

I think it was possible to view the source of applets.