[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.