What’s funny about the “death of applets” is that it highlights a pattern we keep seeing: the browser killed plugins… and then reinvented everything they enabled, but properly this time.

TeaVM and similar toolchains show that the original idea behind applets wasn’t wrong — the implementation model was. Moving Java to JS/WASM with tree-shaking, minification, and real browser APIs gives you all the benefits without the security nightmare.

The interesting takeaway isn’t nostalgia for applets, but how mature the web stack has become: the browser is finally the runtime applets always wanted.

> reinvented everything they enabled, but properly this time

"Properly"? I'm not convinced. Browsers have grown incredibly large and complex. Every plugin it replaced by JS-based APIs has become a security nightmare in almost exactly the same way as the plugin based approach. Browsers have a lot of features, but if they were implemented "properly", the user would have far more control than they do now. The cynic in me thinks that many of these features are mostly there to facilitate ad-tech and user tracking. From fingerprintable canvas to access to devices.