Most of it is politics. Applets aren't fundamentally more insecure than other competing technologies like Flash or Silverlight. They just got a lot of hate, fir

Most of it is politics. Applets aren't fundamentally more insecure than other competing technologies like Flash or Silverlight. They just got a lot of hate, first due to the Microsoft "embrace and extend" attempts in the 90s (shipping its own awful JVM) and now again due to the buyout by Oracle with its horrible PR. It's nonsense that modern browsers treat Java applets as if they were radiactive material, showing lots of warnings and scary dialogs (and even forcing you to update) while they do nothing of the sort with Flash.