applets were largely unused and flash was mostly used for ads, neither of which were even remotely as huge and gross as the chromium codebase.

nowadays you have many "desktop" applications bundling their own special build of chrome just because developers are so lazy(and I'd say many severely lacking critical judgement) they feel like taking their webapp and deploying as a "desktop" application.

The situation is infinitely much worse than it was in 1995.