Not that it much matters, since Chrome doesn't support the NPAPI plugin, and FireFox is expected to drop support early in the new year, leaving Applets an essentially IE only thing.
http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/277
There was a session at Java ONE about a set of API that will be gone in Java 10 after this gets introduced in Java 9.
I haven't used it for awhile now, but I used to work on a serious Groovy code base. It's out of it's league now. Once Kotlin's scripting story gets rolling it should eat the rest of Groovy's lunch.
As the article goes on, it becomes clear that a modern GC managed system is no simple thing. As you start to add all the choices and tuning you end up re-inventing the JVM runtime.
Any program of sufficient complexity eventually ends up having GC.
Java may be too resource hungry for trivial programs. For large programs Java is an industrial strength runtime platform. Or I should say the JVM is. You don't have to use the Java language. You can use a number of languages that compile to JVM bytecode.