[pjmlp]

In the 90's many banks would make you install a variant of Java applet, ActiveX or Flash, to log into their systems.

In the name of a "better experience".

I know, because that is exactly what many of our customers did on the agency I worked during those days.

[nayuki]

I was too young to have a bank account back then. However, I can personally attest that the Toronto Public Library, around year 2000+/-2, had a Java applet on their public website which the general public used to search the library's catalog. I may or may not have saved a snapshot of one of those JAR files. Needless to say, the Java applet was awkward compared to a properly designed web application - e.g. loading screens, weird widgets that were neither web nor Windows, inability to select text by default, inability to use the web browser's UI controls (e.g. back/forward/reload/URL-bar).