Java applets versus HTML DOM is a debatably parallel competition, but the web was also a connected & online medium, with it's own protocol, and that begat interoperability & connectivity to a degree that applications never came anywhere close to.

Ironically, for all the fragmented wild ecosystem of webdev today, with a million different libraries & toolchains & frameworks, the web has maintained & iterated on a very consistent & coherent underpinning that is fundamentally cross-computer, that is globally connected via the url. Applications were always a lesser beast, damned by lower horizons, and if they dared to try to do more, were on their own with no other applications to interoperate across & on their own with their protocols. The web grew many UI development options atop consistent DOM and protocols, but the application had consistent UI development options across scattered connectivity protocols, if any (and often none).

Looking at the internet as an application delivery platform ignores that the web grew because it was both an application and content delivery system, interwoven, together, and infinitely remixable & extensible.

Applets relied on the browser. I’m talking about using Java or languages targeting the JVM outside of the browser as applications communicating over network protocols to deliver content and communicate. Java was designed with networking in mind. Applets were added to Netscape because the browser and web had become popular. But Java itself was positioned to be an application delivery platform over the internet.

And Im saying that is a much much smaller dream/ambition than what the web went after.

Apologies for saying applets. I meant the entire Java apps world. That was misleading, you were right to be confused.