[smaudet]

And the whole rest of the Internet...

The issue here is not Java or it's complexity. The point is also not Java, it's incidental that it was popular at the time. It's people acting irrationally about things and jumping ship for an even-worse system.

Like, yes, if that really were the whole attack surface of JS, sure nobody would care. They also wouldn't use it...and nothing we cared about would use it either...

[lmz]

The security issues with Java applets usually led to local unsandboxed code execution. It's a lot harder to do that with JS because just running Java and confusing the security manager gets you full Java library access, vs JS with no built in I/O.