The APPLET Tag

plugins and media 1996 dead

Java in the page. Ripple effects, fire text, and a navigation menu that took eight seconds to appear.

In 2026: Dead. Chrome dropped the plugin API in 2015, Firefox followed in 2017, and no modern browser can run an applet at all. The tag itself was deprecated in HTML 4.01 in favour of OBJECT, which then also died.

Where it came from: Sun Microsystems Java applet documentation, 1996. Anfy applets by Fabio Ciucci, anfyteam.com, 1997 onward. Wikipedia ↗

<!-- The water ripple effect, on roughly one in five pages in 1998 -->
<applet code="Lake.class" archive="lake.jar" width="400" height="300">
  <param name="image"  value="images/logo.jpg">
  <param name="ripples" value="6">
  <param name="halfsize" value="YES">
  <p>Your browser does not support Java. This is where the lake went.</p>
</applet>

<!-- Anfy, the shareware applet pack everybody used -->
<applet code="anfy.class" codebase="anfy/" width="320" height="200">
  <param name="credits" value="Applet by Fabio Ciucci">
  <param name="reg" value="unregistered">
</applet>

<!-- The HTML 4 replacement, which also died -->
<object classid="java:Lake.class" width="400" height="300">
  <param name="image" value="images/logo.jpg">
</object>

sandboxed demo · breaks nothing but itselfrestart

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