Recently re-investigating applets, and coming to the conclusion that Sun probably doesn’t want anyone to write them any more - perhaps they’re a bit of an embarassment, giving java a bad rap, getting confused with javascript and all that. If I were a cynical strategy person at Sun that’s probably what I’d do ;D.
I see java still doesn’t work with Mozilla and Firefox (which are rapidly moving towards 30% market share on Windows alone; not exactly a small number of people):
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/java.html
“On some systems, JRE 1.4.2 and later do not work. In this case, you can use JRE 1.4.1_07”
Um, no. 1.4.1 is known to be so badly broken as to be unusuable in many areas. 1.4.1 is not an option. Irrespective of the difficulty of getting it running in parallel with a pre-installed higher verison (1.4.2), which no-one wants to explain to anyone. Joe Bloggs hasn’t a chance, really.
“Always make a symbolic link, as shown above, instead of copying the plugin. If you copy the plugin, your browser will crash every time you open a page containing a Java applet. You have been warned!”
WTF? Allegedly, this is Sun’s decision to hard-code the plugin to only search in it’s current directory, and to totally ignore the environment etc (although from personal experience I can imagine that load-ordering issues mean that such data isn’t available at the point when the plugin is started, it’s still possible to workaround). Google a bit and you’ll find that many of the lucky people who can use java as a plugin in Mozilla (note the unexplained note that this is not everyone) do the obvious: they copy the plugin, and immediately cause Mozilla to crash big time on every java-enabled page.
That, surely, is Mozilla’s fault (and IIRC this bug has been around for a year or more) Not exactly a welcome sign to people wanting to try out java applets is it really? 
Sigh.