No, the security came much later, by then the ship was already abandoned. Also, in many ways, the security of Java Applets was actually better than ActionScript

No, the security came much later, by then the ship was already abandoned. Also, in many ways, the security of Java Applets was actually better than ActionScript. For example, it could actually contain security contexts within one Applet. In ActionScript, every line of code had access to everything, which is a huge engineering flaw. Exception to this are web workers, but their usability is very low.