Re: "The browser will now only run Flash"
"Applets were not one of Sun's better ideas for Java..."
Say what? Applets were the sole point of Java. The somewhat bizarre(*) idea of running Java on the server side came later and only as a belated attempt to maintain interest in what was by then a language dying out because Sun were apparently unable to write a secure JVM to run the applets in.
(* Yes, bizarre, because if you don't trust the code running on your server then you have bigger problems than your choice of programming language.)