dRother

No, it's because Applets, like Flash, are a narrow, specific, proprietary setting. Nobody has ever questioned that Java can handle something like that.

The interesting part here is that it is showing that browsers and JavaScript, with a very different approach than Flash or Java, can now handle this sort of computationally intensive, graphics intensive application without any OS-specific plugins.

Many games are essentially open at this point, in that Nintendo and other publishers haven't asked that the roms not be distributed.

The ones they really care about they have an ESA request on. See http://www.romnation.net/srv/page/esa.html (WARNING : horrible flashing ads). This includes all Mario games, Zelda, and so on.

It doesn't work at all in IE. It's not anything to do with flash, rather, IE's lack of support for canvas. It gives a JS error on page load (object doesn't support this property or method), on line 28 where it tries to call Canvas getContext.