Oracle To Drop Java Browser Plugin In JDK 9 (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes: After Mozilla said in October that it would stop supporting Firefox plugins on the older NPAPI technology, Oracle had no choice now but to announce the deprecation of the Java browser plugin starting with the release of the JDK version 9, which is set for release in March 2017, and developers are urged to start using the Java Web Start pluginless technology instead. Security issues also had a big part in Java's demise.

Comments

Well, we will be using JRE 8 for a while then

[jfdavis668]

We have way to many systems dependent on it. Most of our big applications are JSP based, but we have quite a few java applications browser and even desktop based.

Re:Well, we will be using JRE 8 for a while then

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

A bad tech bet? Java as a web technology has lasted in the region of two decades. There are Java applets that academics wrote as quick illustrations of some concept from their lecture course in the 1990s that are still just as valid and still work just as well today, except for the browser guys and Oracle deciding applets should die. Java has its problems, but it has been one of the most stable and reliable technologies in the history of computing.

If you want to talk about bad tech bets, consider that if a trendy JS framework is still in serious development after two years it's doing well. For some newer features, if all the main browsers can even manage to provide a stable and compatible implementation for two months (long enough for all the evergreen ones to update once or twice) it's a pleasant surprise.

Re:Well, we will be using JRE 8 for a while then

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Your fear-mongering is several years of out date. Java applets have had multiple levels of click-to-play style protection for a long time. Malware authors are having much more success targeting things like Android users these days.

Re:GOOD

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There is nothing about 'java' the language that did that; but it is very hard to deny that vulnerabilities in the implementation of support for embedded java applets have been a huge source of desktop infections. Adobe might be slightly worse; but that's damning by very faint praise.

I'll leave arguing about the merits of the language and the JVM to the experts; but applet support has, quite simply, been painfully unsuitable for use on anything except fully trusted, ideally internal, material more or less forever, and neither Sun nor Oracle ever got it up to snuff for use in a mostly-untrusted web browsing environment.

"Java's demise"

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardly, unless you are talking about browser plugin technology. It was never big there to begin with, but Java is still a major player in server side technology.

Re:I'm old enough to remember

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The thing is, Java applets actually were write once, run anywhere in terms of browser portability, at least until the powers that be started making it difficult to run applets in a browser at all. The same was true of Flash.

In contrast, newer technologies that are supposed to provide functionality that plugins were good for, like HTML5 media elements and canvas/SVG/WebGL, have wildly different levels of feature support, implementation quality, and performance across browsers. I understand the reasons browser makers want to drop plugin support, but the alternative browser-native technologies still have a long way to go.

Re:I'm old enough to remember

[Lisandro]

Been stating this for a long time now. I've had (way) less issues writing portable code in Python and Perl than i did in Java.

Re:GOOD

[Junta]

I don't like Java for other reasons, but the performance of the runtime is actually not out of whack compared to other managed runtimes.

Many Java developers however put out poor performing code. They would do things terribly no matter the language.