It was not. It was demonstrably worse. It had it's own janky UI that barely worked, it failed to understand the filesystem most of the time, and it failed to integrate cleanly with any other devices on the system.
Everything _else_ was able to do this just fine, in particular it's main competition, Adobe flash. That was actually _almost_ a first class experience and I didn't need to track down and install "icedtea" to make it all work. It just worked out of the box.
The JVM promised "write once, run anywhere." You can blame me for that failure, if you like, but it was then and always was a flat lie. You simply choose to ignore this.
