Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
1–10 of 101 posts
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#2> In the 2000's, politics interfered and browser vendors removed plug-in support, instead preferring their own walled gardens and restricted sandboxes
That's one way to say it. The more common way was that users got tired of crappy plugins crashing their browsers, and browser devs got tired of endless complaints from their users.
It wasn't "politics" of any sort that made browsers sandbox everything. It was the insane number of crashes, out-of-memories, pegged CPUs, and security vulnerabilities that pushed things over the edge. You can only sit through so many dozens of Adobe 0-days before it starts to grate.
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#3The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time, was hitting a web page and having it lock the browser for that amount of load time.
I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM.
I hear that now, decades into Java, they have figured out how to launch a program without slowing a computer down for 10+ seconds, but I'll be damned if I find out. There are still so many rough edges that they never even bothered to try to fix about launching a .jar with classpath dependencies. What a mess!
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#4Not sure if I get this: WASM lets you use any language in the browser, though it still works way better with languages without GC, such as Rust or a transpiling C engine. Java is unlikely to be the best choice.
In the era of LLM assistants like Claude Code, any engineer can write frontend code using popular stacks like React and TypeScript. This use case is when those tools shine.
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#5> In the 2000's, politics interfered and browser vendors removed plug-in support, instead preferring their own walled gardens and restricted sandboxes That's one way to say it. The more common way was that users got tired of crappy plugins crashing their browsers, and browser devs got tired of endless complaints from their users. It wasn't "politics" of any sort that made browsers sandbox everything. It was the insan…
Exactly.
Java was so buggy and had so many security issues about 20 years ago that my local authorities gave a security advisory to not install it at all in end user/home computers. That finally forced the hand of some banks to stop using it for online banking apps.
Flash also had a long run of security issues.
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#6> In the 2000's, politics interfered and browser vendors removed plug-in support, instead preferring their own walled gardens and restricted sandboxes That's one way to say it. The more common way was that users got tired of crappy plugins crashing their browsers, and browser devs got tired of endless complaints from their users. It wasn't "politics" of any sort that made browsers sandbox everything. It was the insan…
Yeah, a totally mind boggling statement, almost completely void of reality. I wasn't even tired of the crashes, it was just a totally awful experience of using them in every way. They took forever to load, were clunky to use and even just downright ugly because the UI had nothing to do with what you usually got to use, and was a lot worse. The idea was good on paper, but the implementation sucked.
Everyone, well almost everyone apparently, was relieved we didn't have to deal with any of that anymore.
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#7The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time, was hitting a web page and having it lock the browser for that amount of load time. I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM. I hear that no…
I guess in the era of SSDs (vs. spinning disks) and multi-GHz cores, the startup really isn't a big issue anymore?
I wonder how long Teams or Slack would take to launch when it's on a 5400rpm disk on a 2000 era computer...
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#8The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time, was hitting a web page and having it lock the browser for that amount of load time. I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM. I hear that no…
What the heck are you writing about, you clearly have no clue about last 2+ decades of Java or topic in general but felt the urgent need to emotionally vent off because... ?
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#9The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time, was hitting a web page and having it lock the browser for that amount of load time. I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM. I hear that no…
I understand the sarcasm but this take is devoid of fact. Modern Java loads fast, Java 21 has pretty good functional programming featurez. The ecosystem churns out language level features at a pace and a budget that would put most large funded startups to shame.
Java is also the workhorse of the big data ecosystem and moves enough money either as product revenue or as transactions than most nations GDP. They didn't figure out startup times for 10+ years, they were busy dealing with Oracle and its messy management. I think it will simply continue to get better given that Java has endured through so many language fads. It has its ways to go but it will end up like SQL - here before we were alive and will be here when most of us are dead.
Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better
#10Not sure if I get this: WASM lets you use any language in the browser, though it still works way better with languages without GC, such as Rust or a transpiling C engine. Java is unlikely to be the best choice. In the era of LLM assistants like Claude Code, any engineer can write frontend code using popular stacks like React and TypeScript. This use case is when those tools shine.
Java running in the browser is unlikely as typescript has largely tamed the mess of Javascript. Java requires a JVM and shipping an entire JVM so its runs atop another VM is kinda redundant. Except if JVM itself gets compiled and cached as a WASM bundle and Java compilers start accept WASM-JVM as a target. That will just be distraction tbh, Java has its strength in large scale systems and it should just focus on those rather than get caught up in Frontend's messy world.