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.

It mostly was politics. Browser crashes and slowness were almost always traced down to microsoft own java plugin that strongarmed proper java plugin install out of the way every update and every now and then to be sure, with a semi compatible runtime and a classloarlder that insisted fronting the dow load of all resources.

It created so much uncertainty across the ecosystem even today people repeat the "applet crashes browser line, god riddance" line

But it was deliberate action by microsoft.

So yeah 100% politics because without a court document in modern society we cannot call this anything else.