For a brief period. So did many other short-term phenomena, from BASIC to MS Access to Clipper to Pacman. And now they are stuff for the museums. Except for Pacman, of course.
> Never made much of an impact on the desktop
So? It still survived competition with Microsoft - and, arguably, won on every platform except Windows, non-Windows .net use is still basically zero and Linux rules server world, so...
> What's the most widely used Java desktop app?
I honestly have no idea. Well, Eclipse of course, IntelliJ suite of tools, probably, but it could be some other apps are Java too and I just don't know it. The point is Java is alive and well despite competition from mighty invincible Microsoft.
Eclipse is way more than just Java IDE. In fact, I've been using Eclipse for many years for a number of purposes, and 80% of that time - not as Java IDE.
>> MSIE? Dominates the world.
IE did dominate the world. Remember Netscape? IE was at like 90% in the early 2000's until Firefox showed up.
>> Java? Completely unknown
Never made much of an impact on the desktop. What's the most widely used Java desktop app? Was there ever one? Eclipse/Netbeans comes to mind.