As of September 2015, most people are not able to run Java client software (including applets) in the most popular browser in the USA today. If you’re not up to date on browser popularity, I’m talking about Chrome, which has achieved a market share of 40%-60%, depending on the source.

With the recent news that Google’s Chrome will be disabling plug-ins that support Flash, Java, Silverlight and more, it is worth taking a look at how we got here and what this means for the future. When browsers and the web were young, some 25 years ago, a handful of pioneering indivi