Yes the initial hype on Java when it came out of Sun was all around desktop use, often but not exclusively in browser. They even tinkered with the idea of writing the browser — even an OS! — in Java. There was literally something called JavaOS. Anyone remember the JavaStation?
Trouble is the computers of 1996, combined with the less optimized JVM of 1996, were really not up to the task. And I would venture the GUI libraries were not there yet either. 24 years later we have very speedy JVMs and much faster computers and networks and toolkits like the one in the article (JavaFX) sound much smoother. Meanwhile Clojure offers concurrency primitives that are making threading much more accessible.
Yup, and since VSCode and IntelliJ both used too much RAM, I needed to switch to Emacs on my old dell laptop, yet it used to be that people mocked Emacs for using too much RAM, in fact, the joke was that Emacs stood for: Eight megabytes and constantly swapping.
The wheel just goes round and round :p
Unfortunately I am old enough to remember starting emacs remotely on a fellow student's computer so that he stopped working and went to the restaurant with us: starting emacs 'froze' the computer and made it unusable for a (small) duration..
So there's some truth behind the joke: vi started much faster.
So I never learned emacs which I regret now because I feel that emacs is much better as a C++ IDE than vim.
Now we're seeing a proliferation of Electron apps - web apps - that are widely disliked/mocked because they are heavyweight, don't use platform-standard widgets, etc. And at least in this piece, an alternative is the JVM.