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

Posted by timothy on from the soon-still-won't-be-too-soon dept.

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.

23 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Well, we will be using JRE 8 for a while then by jfdavis668 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Well, we will be using JRE 8 for a while then by Sique · · Score: 2

      Does not necessarily work that way. I have some systems to support whose administration website uses Java 1.4 (luckily the last of the Java 1.3 ones was scrapped lately). So I have to keep some VMs ready if I have to do something there because no one will ever invest in updating the management frontend. Those machines were deployed somewhen in the 1990ies, and they are still humming along, no immediate pressure for the actual operator of them to replace them with anything more recent, as none of the newer features is important to him.

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      .sig: Sique *sigh*
    2. Re:Well, we will be using JRE 8 for a while then by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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    3. Re:Well, we will be using JRE 8 for a while then by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
    4. Re:Well, we will be using JRE 8 for a while then by subanark · · Score: 2

      JSP - No change
      Desktop - No change
      Browser - Easy fix

      If you really have applet still in use today, you can convert them to Web Start without touching the binary. All you need to do is update your web page and make a jnlp file that points to where the applet is and any configuration that was originally on the web page itself.

      There aren't many problems,here are the edge cases I can see:
      1. Packaged sites - You want to support your applet with ads (who does this with Java anymore?)
      2. Javascript interop.
      3. Cross applet communication (aside from a nasty security bug 12 years ago, who does this)

    5. Re:Well, we will be using JRE 8 for a while then by Tablizer · · Score: 2

      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

      Odd, I found about 50% of such things don't work anymore. (And it feels risky to even try them.)

      Anyhow, we need a new browser standard/paradigm that gives brower-based applications desktop-like behavior and natively supports common desktop idioms, such as scroll-bars, MDI, combo-boxes, grid editors, etc. so that one doesn't have to download an entire JS GUI library for each app.

      Desktop GUI's idioms pretty much matured by the early 90's; it's not like a moving standard (ignoring certain stupid eye-candy fads). Web standards don't fit what app developers want to do and what users expect. The web standards are fairly good at brochure-ware, but suck for work-oriented applications and CRUD GUI's. Getting such GUI's to work and still work after 3 years should NOT be an arcane art. It's around 5 to 20 times the code it takes for an app in VB, Delphi, Paradox, PowerBuilder, etc., and flakier.

      I'm tired of the crapped up web stack for apps. It's a resource drain and huge leap backward.

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      Table-ized A.I.
    6. Re:Well, we will be using JRE 8 for a while then by gmack · · Score: 2

      And how do I update the web page on our IP KVM switch?

    7. Re:Well, we will be using JRE 8 for a while then by subanark · · Score: 2

      Assuming that the java applet is the only thing you are interested in (as in it is not heavily integrated with the web page), you can use appletviewer. I don't think they will get rid of this as it is just a simple container for applets rather than interfacing with the browser. Took me an hour back in college to make one of those myself.

      I think you can also put the jsp file that runs the applet on another server as long as it is on the same domain as your switch.

    8. Re:Well, we will be using JRE 8 for a while then by adler187 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Headline is wrong (where am I? Oh, right Slashdot) and the summary is not fully correct. Here's what the blog post actually says:

      "Oracle plans to deprecate the Java browser plugin in JDK 9. This technology will be removed from the Oracle JDK and JRE in a future Java SE release."

      So you have until JRE 10 at the earliest when it's removed. JRE 9 isn't scheduled to come out until 2017 and JRE 10 sometime after that, so the more pressing problem will be finding a browser that supports NPAPI plugins to even run the current plugin: Chrome has already removed NPAPI support in Chrome 45, Firefox will be removing it by the end of 2016, Edge never had NPAPI support, and I have no idea about Apple's plans with Safari (my guess would be remove support in next release of OS X).

      Gonna have to keep around an old version of Firefox or Chrome (portable version, perhaps?) to be able to use legacy applet based applications.

  2. Demise? by frostfreek1444 · · Score: 2

    Java's 'demise'? I think that's a bit of an exaggeration.

  3. Re:GOOD by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 2

    Fuck Java. I hated it was a requirement for my networking classes and I hate what it has done to the industry in terms of advertising/abuse.

    Java didn't do any of that. People did. And if it wasn't Java, they would have used something else. Java, is just a tool that people use to accomplish a goal.

  4. Re:GOOD by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:But ... by robmv · · Score: 2

    But but browser insecurity is because of plugins (Mozilla security bugs). I know that because browser vendors told me so in the 2000s and experts are NEVER wrong. :P

    Note: bugs aren't the only problem here, it is your update process, and Oracle Java has an awful one, add to that that people do not update. OpenJDK does not suffer of this bad update process because distributions use their package manager to push updates.

  6. "Java's demise" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:GOOD by freak0fnature · · Score: 4, Informative

    So does every other language...what's your point?

  8. Re:I'm old enough to remember by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
  9. Re:Inevitable by mrops · · Score: 2

    As a java developer, working on java from JDK 1.0,

    This is a long time coming, Java is now mostly used on large server side projects. Its driving the Big Data revolution with technologies like Apache Spark. Running countless servers on Tomcat and/or Spring containers.

    Oracle is not wrong in discontinuing the browser plugin. They should have done it with JDK 5

  10. Re:GOOD by Junta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  11. Dupe post got promoted. by Z00L00K · · Score: 2

    Interestingly the dupe post promoting Softpedia got promoted over the post that directly linked the Oracle Blog post: http://slashdot.org/submission...

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    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  12. Re:GOOD by GuB-42 · · Score: 2

    Unfortunately for you (or any Java hater), Java as a programming language is as healthy as ever, with Java devs being on high demand despite being commonly taught in school. Android is probably no stranger to its renewed success.
    If you are talking about Java applets (that's what the browser plugin is for), it only had limited success : Flash and then JavaScript essentially killed it. As for advertising/abuse, I don't remember it being that bad, at least compared to Flash. It did have a lot of vulnerabilities though but it was mostly because of sloppy coding rather than a fundamentally broken design.

  13. Re:GOOD by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 2

    So does every other language...what's your point?

    He is having problems with his homework. You know, OP is just suffering from "little rebel without a cause with zero exposure outside the classroom" syndrome.

  14. Re:I'm old enough to remember by NatasRevol · · Score: 2

    Most networking gear mgmt is tied to a specific version of java.

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    There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
  15. Re:GOOD by umghhh · · Score: 2

    I have to agree. I have seen so many people coming to us straight from university that could code java and would not accept that they need to know anything about basics like memory management for instance - I mean we have gc so why should we bother, right? What I noticed over the years is that real basic coding tool that is always very helpful and without which you cannot code and design stuff properly is brains. Refusal to use it usually leads to situation where any programming language is bad for the task.