I would attribute this much more to Mobile Safari saying "no", which killed off plugins, especially Flash. Java Applets were essentially slow Flash from a user's perspective.

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jeroenhd 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don't think Safari mattered much. Java was still used for things that wouldn't work on phones without massive redesigns anyway.

I doubt you'd have been able to bootstrap Runescape in any form, even rewritten in native code, on the first iPhone to support apps. Applets worked fine on desktops and tablets which was what they were designed for.

Browser vendors killed the API because when they looked at crashes, freezes, and performance opportunities, the Flash/Java/etc. API kept standing out. Multithreaded rendering became practical only after the old extension model was refactorerd and even then browsers were held down by the terrible plugin implementations they needed to work around.

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masklinn 3 days ago | parent [-]

> I don't think Safari mattered much.

Apple was the first to publicly call out native plugins (jobs did so on stage) and outright refused to support them on iOS, then everyone else followed suit.

	▲	jeroenhd 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>then everyone else followed suit NPAPI's death in non-IE-browsers started around 2015. Jobs announcing mobile Safari without Flash was 2010. Unfortunately, ActiveX still works to this very day. Chrome built up a whole new PPAPI to support reasonably fast Flash support after the Jobs announcement. Microsoft launched a major release of Silverlight long after Jobs' speech, but Silverlight (rightfully) died with Windows Phone, which it was the main UI platform for around its practical death. Had Microsoft managed to launch a decent mobile operating system, we'd probably still be running Silverlight in some fashion today. Even still, Silverlight lasted well until 2021 before Silverlight actually fell out of support. Jobs may have had a hand in the death of Flash websites, but when it came to Java Applets/Silverlight, the decision had little impact. That plugin model was slowly dying on its own already.
	▲	kergonath 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> then everyone else followed suit There was a Flash runtime on Android. It was terrible. Java applets were already dead anyway, outside of professional contexts, which are not relevant on phones anyway.