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

> In the 2000's, politics interfered and browser vendors removed plug-in support, instead preferring their own walled gardens and restricted sandboxes

That's one way to say it. The more common way was that users got tired of crappy plugins crashing their browsers, and browser devs got tired of endless complaints from their users.

It wasn't "politics" of any sort that made browsers sandbox everything. It was the insane number of crashes, out-of-memories, pegged CPUs, and security vulnerabilities that pushed things over the edge. You can only sit through so many dozens of Adobe 0-days before it starts to grate.

The "walled gardens" he referred to are in fact based on open standards and open source, while the Applet runtime is not.

Not all of Java is open source. The TCK, the testing suite for standard compliance, for instance, is proprietary, and only organizations with Oracle's blessing can gain access. AdoptOpenJDK was only granted access after they stopped distributing another Java runtime, OpenJ9.

ActiveX was hell for security.

ActiveX was its own special kind of terrible for many reasons, but so were Java, Flash, and Silverlight. At least ActiveX didn't hide the fact you were about to grant arbitrary code execution to a website, because you might as well have assumed that the second these plugins were loaded.

The only advantage to Java applets I can think of is that they had the advantage of freezing the browser so it could no longer be hacked.

The Java applet system was designed better than ActiveX but in practice I've always found it to be so much worse of an end user experience. This probably had to do with the fact most ActiveX components were rather small integrations rather than (badly fitted) full-page UIs.

In my experience, most of the more important Java-on-the-web stuff was Java Web Start as opposed to applets. And Java Web Start was all kinds of bad. About the only remotely good thing I could say is that it has a sandbox. Which protected no one from anything, by design, because it was the app’s choice whether to use it. And Web Start apps also often included native code, too, so they weren’t even portable.