Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time, was hitting a web page and having it lock the browser for that amount of load time.

I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM.

I hear that now, decades into Java, they have figured out how to launch a program without slowing a computer down for 10+ seconds, but I'll be damned if I find out. There are still so many rough edges that they never even bothered to try to fix about launching a .jar with classpath dependencies. What a mess!

I guess in the era of SSDs (vs. spinning disks) and multi-GHz cores, the startup really isn't a big issue anymore?

I wonder how long Teams or Slack would take to launch when it's on a 5400rpm disk on a 2000 era computer...