[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.