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.

A coworker of mine that worked at Adobe through the death of flash said a big reason for that death was Apple deciding the Ipod touch Safari would not support plugins.

Adobe had big plans on the Ipod supporting Flash and that announcement all but killed their Flash division.

Yes, Adobe supported Flash for years after that, but it was more of a life support thing and not active development. They saw the writing on the wall and knew that for flash to survive, it had to survive in a mobile world.

With the decreased support of flash, the other browser devs simply followed suit and killed off a route for something like Flash running in a browser.