Small percentage but still interesting. Although if this functionality didn't exist, would it really be missed? I suppose these are the people playing on guest computers/at work. Wonder how many of those 33% of people have an up-to-date Java plugin?
Yes, this is somewhat unfortunate and someone should really light a fire under the HTML5 implementors. However, I wouldn't call it essential since you can archive/zip/tar a bunch of files and upload them all at once and do the processing server side.
Yea, I have an idea of what would happen ... we'd have a ton less people getting their boxes easily owned because they visited some webpage and happen to have some old technology installed that they don't ever even use.