There was a point in time they were acceptable, but that was too long after DHTML/AJAX was good enough for the simple things, and Flash for the flashy things.
The first iterations were so incredibly slow, bloated and foreign that I would usually close the page after 10 secs or so when the applet was still initializing.
It’s ok to like them and miss them - they did give us Minecraft and stuff. But they were dead long before oracle and long before they were acceptable.
