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.

Flash is still a big loss imho, the ecosystem of games, movies and demonstration thingies was amazing and they were accessible to create by many. Unlike Java applets that slowed the main browser UI thread to a crawl if they didn't load they usually didn't), Flash didn't have such slowdowns.

One exception is early 2000s Runescape: that was Java in browser but always loaded, no gray screen and hanging browser. They knew what they were doing.

Many of the old games and movies still play back well with Ruffle installed (https://ruffle.rs/). Newgrounds embeds it by default for old interactive flash media that they couldn't convert directly to video.

It's not a perfect fit, but it works. The speed of Ruffle loading on a page is similar to that of Flash initializing, so you can arguably still make flash websites and animations to get the old look and feel if you stick to the Ruffle compatibility range. The half-to-one-second page freeze that was the norm now feels wrong, though, so maybe it's not the best idea to put Flash components everywhere like we used to do.

Runescape proved that Java could be a pretty decent system, but so many inexperienced/bad Java developers killed the ecosystem. The same is true on the backend, where Java still suffers from the reputation the Java 7 monolithic mega projects left behind.

It's good that we have the runtime to run old Flash games. What we lost is an extremely easy environment for authoring/creating them. Nothing has come even close since Flash. Not just game, but any kind of interactions and animations on the web.

Where did the tools go?

Can a person not run Flash authoring tools with an era-appropriate operating system in a VM or something?