It was a PITA to manage for end users. They had to install the JVM and update it when the JVM updater told them so. Many people didn't update (slow connections

It was a PITA to manage for end users. They had to install the JVM and update it when the JVM updater told them so. Many people didn't update (slow connections for a file size comparable to today's one, no time, etc.) Then the application had its own non native widgets and was noticeably slower than native ones. Then (more importantly IMHO) developers discovered that HTML interfaces were good enough even 25 years ago and being able to update a web application (they were no app back then) even only once per month was so much better than having to distribute thousands or millions of copies of a desktop application. Game over. BTW that was web 1.0.