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We were writing and shipping desktop applications with it back in the nineties. Although many of the arguments against it were similar to the arguments against Electron today.

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I think the UI look and feel was very ugly for many users and that caused its demise. The cross platform skin was ugly. The native skins were in the uncanny valley.

The framework was reasonably good for its time. By the time good looking UI frameworks came, the bad reputation was already set.

Even the later JavaFX was a tasteless exercise. I opened some apps and you could tell within 1 second that something was wrong because all the text was using fugly non-platform-native (or somehow screwed up) text rendering.

I think SWT was the best option if you wanted native controls.

Yeah back then a java application could take several minutes to open.

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