alt Hacker NewsConsidering that Microsoft was a completely different beast in that time, I'm not surprised it does not seem that silly.
M$ (appropriate name for that time) of the day was doing its best to own everything and the did not let up on trying to hold back the open source internet technologies until the early 2010's I believe. Its my opinion that they were successful in killing Java Applets, which were never able to improve past the first versions and JavaScript and CSS in general was held back many years.
I still recall my corporate overloards trying to push me to support IE's latest 'technologies' but I resisted and instead started supporting Mozilla 3.0 as soon as they fixed some core JS bugs for our custom built enterprise JavaScript SPA tools in the early 2000's. It turned out to be a great decision as the fortune 500 company started using Mozilla / Firefox in other internal apps in later years long before it became common place.
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Applets died because of many reasons, like absurd startup time for the JRE (often just for silly animations), absurd memory requirements (for the time) and associated crashes, weird compatibility issues in the initial releases of the Java platform, a silly security model based on the assumption that only good actors will be able to get a CA certificate in order to do whatever they want in your PC, an immature sandboxing technology in browsers (not only IE), etc.
> M$ (appropriate name for that time)
It’s even more appropriate nowadays, I’d say.
Microsoft hasn't really changed that much besides getting a better PR department.
Then there was Amazon: https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls
I had high hopes for s2n, but looks like it never really caught on outside of AWS.
Microsoft is still trying to hold back everything they can - they're just losing.
I don't think it was Microsoft that killed Java applets. I mean, for one thing, they always worked in IE, which was really the only avenue through which MS could have affected them.
No, Java applets failed because they became the poster child for "Java is slow" take. Even though it wasn't exactly true in general, it was certainly true of applets, what with waiting for them to download and then waiting for the JVM to spin up.
What killed them was 1) HTML/JS itself getting better at dynamic stuff that previously required something like applets, and 2) Flash taking over the remaining niche for which HTML wasn't good enough.