Your timeline is off by about five years. Java support shipped with Netscape Navigator 2 in 1995, and 95/96/97 is when Java hype and applet experimentation peaked.
Netscape dominated this era. IE6 wouldn’t come out until 2001 and IE share generally wouldn’t cross 50% until 2000 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet-explorer-usage...
By the time Mozilla spun up with open sourced Netscape code, Java in the browser was very much dead.
You nailed the other stuff though.
(Kind of an academic point but I’m curious if Java browser/page integration was much worse than JavaScript in those days. Back then JS wasn’t very capable itself and Netscape was clearly willing to work to promote Java, to the point of mutilating and renaming the language that became JavaScript. I’m not sure back then there was even the term or concept of DOM, and certainly no AJAX. It may be a case of JavaScript just evolving a lot more because applets were so jank as to be DOA)
