Yes, but we did everything we could to stay away from things like java, downloads and plug-ins. Our mantra was 'it just has to work with whatever the user already has'.
And there always was a way, even if sometimes it required some - for want of a better word ;) - unorthodox methods.
ISTR some webcam software that would fall back to a java applet (that would parse the multipart MIME) on IE. Anything is preferable to that though!