Java has always had challenges ont he desktop, but I don't agree with a lot of your assertions. > ..users will have to deal with 100MB+ downloads I've never s

Java has always had challenges ont he desktop, but I don't agree with a lot of your assertions. > ..users will have to deal with 100MB+ downloads I've never seen a JRE download that big. At most it's around 25Mb, although in practice you can get it a lot smaller than that (sub 10Mb for the minimal install afaik). > ..One project I want to do for myself is a usable Del.icio.us client for OSX. Java is already shipped on every copy of OS X - so zero download in that case. The startup time seems just fine. I'm using Apache JMeter right now and the startup time seems about the same as any other app I use.