A few good points.

But I still think it would be nice to be able to have anyone in a company intranet connect to oracle without having to install the client. I would be ok with the network map idea, but... But (like many places) not all users connect to the same domain. (Enterprise Level stuff) also they are not even on the same network MANY times. Usally they need to connect 100% over the internet from clients locations, using a clinets machine. ActiveX allows us to do that.

The JDBC Thin clinet is nice for java because you include the JDBC class files with you class file in a JAR file. The browser takes care of it all and you can connect without having to install much. (1meg or so)