Yes. Applets were very slow to load, and more dangerous than flash. I think applet was the first tag removed. But at the time, you could load up excel in a tag with the right com magic.
The early web boom was wild.
The early web boom was wild.
<applet> was never removed from HTML, but it was deprecated by HTML4.01 - but only because they wanted to use <object> as a single replacement element: https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#h-13.4
Looks like <applet> was officially obsoleted sometime during the switch from HTML4.01 to the Living Specification version: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/obsolete.html#other-e... - but the spec still permits using <object> or <embed> for Java applets: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/iframe-embed-object.h...