Comment by laughing_man

In the early days javascript wasn't far enough along that you could make a web app without a lot of compromises, and the cross-platform nature of java was a big, big plus. I worked on an internal java client application that was developed on Linux for end users on PC. Ten years after we released the first version, and while it was still under development, a group of powerful managers at our company demanded they be issued Macs instead of the PC corporate standard.

When IT asked us if our application worked on Mac, we shrugged and said "We don't have a Mac to test it. We've never run it on a Mac. We won't support it officially, so if there are Mac specific bugs you're on your own. But... it should work. Try it."

And it did work. All the Mac users had to do was click on our Webstart link just like the PC users. It installed itself properly and ran properly. Never had a single issue related to the OS. Before Java was introduced that was an unobtainable dream in a full-featured windowed application.