I would suggest posting a more noticable message on the web client page saying that it isn't working currently and directing people towards the .exe file. I have gotten messages from several people about this and I'm sure they are not the only ones having this issue.
I asked Ryan about this.
"Well first Oracle stopped letting self signed applets run, so we could have to have the client signed by an official certificate authority"
"which they probably wouldn't do for a private server, and it costs $$"
"but the second blow is that all browsers have now disabled Java"
"so that's why RS no longer will run in browser"
I'm sure when a new webpage is designed, all webclient material will be removed since they cannot work.
What sort of problems are they having downloading the client?