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.

Applets also had no view-source.

Spiritually the web ought to be more than an application development platform. We haven't been doing great about that (with heavily compiled js bundles), but there's still a lot of extensions that many users take for granted. I'm using a continual wordcount extension (50 words so far), and Dark Reader right now.

Applet's are the native app paradigm, where what the app-makers writes is what you get, never a drop more. It's not great. The internet, the land of protocols, deserved better. Is so interesting because it is better.

Don’t worry, they’re trying to sneak back in with WASM and drawing everything to canvas.