I can't see how this makes any more sense than "If you're talking about Visual Studio, you're talking about Mac OS X. It all executes on the same processor." Yes, they both share the same underlying technology, but they are hardly indistiguishable — you can certainly talk about one without addressing the other. You could delete the browser plugin from every computer on the planet and it wouldn't make normal Java apps work any better or worse. The plugin depends on the Java platform, but the Java platform is not in any way dependent on the plugin.

> You can't simply declare it off limits given the massive and repeated security issues surrounding it

I'm not declaring it "off-limits" — I'm suggesting that it is irrelevant to the discussion here. Yes, there are security issues with it, but since nobody here is saying "I think the Java browser plugin is a boss idea," you're either arguing with nobody or trying to denigrate the JVM as a client and server technology based on the fact that it isn't suitable for embedding in a browser. I can't see any way that the Java plugin is really relevant. Similarly, if I went and wrote a terrible plugin to allow Ruby "applets," bringing up that plugin as a criticism of Ruby in other contexts would not be productive.