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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.

6 of 165 comments (clear)

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

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

  2. 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.

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  3. 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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  4. 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.

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  5. 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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  6. 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.