It is rather sad that Java is getting dropped for rich web apps in favor of Javascript. One could imagine an alternate history where it hadn't, perhaps merged into the Mozilla source tree as an integral part of the web.
I particularly liked how it placed security at the forefront and not an afterthought.
Yet Java was pretty widely deployed, with the plugin (I think) being available in Internet Explorer by default. What caused its downfall, or Javascript's success?
A very paranoid hypothesis is that Java was too good, too powerful, too useful directly for users. It would have allowed the deployment of technologies that powerful entities did not want to see, so it was killed off to preserve the status quo. (Oh look, Freenet is available as a Java Web Start installer.)
The somewhat more likely explanation was Sun and Oracle guarded their copyright, patents, or trademarks too jealously.
Optimistically, perhaps Java's time is still yet to come, with the language still undergoing development. I particularly like how other languages are compiling to Java bytecode and targetting the JVM. Intellectual property issues will likely continue to play a key role in how things turn out.
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