> What is the essential difference between the success of browsers and the failure of X-Windows and Java applets? Timeline is one of the key ones. According to

> What is the essential difference between the success of browsers and the failure of X-Windows and Java applets? Timeline is one of the key ones. According to chrome task manager (because browsers need task managers now) the page I'm typing this reply on the contains a text area and your comment is consuming 30MB of RAM. Back when Java applets were getting their reputation for being slow I would have been lucky to have a computer with 32MB of RAM, 8 and 16MB were still common at that time. Now there were some other things that made applets awful, but if they were introduced today they wouldn't seem nearly as bad as we remember, on the same computer this page would be clunky. For x-windows, it was never really a contender because there was no MS compatibility, but the potential was there.