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In Firefox 24 and following, mark all versions of Java as unsafe

bugzilla.mozilla.org

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Re: In Firefox 24 and following, mark all versions of Java as unsafe

#181
post #161

That's a great decision. IT departements already acknowledge the fact that java applets are totally insecure and dangerous , and Java or Flash shouldnt run in the browser. You want to program stuffs in the browser ? use javascript and html5 apis. You want to do socket stuffs in the browser? use a proxy server. But dont expose your users to exploits by making them install Java. You want to build future proof solutions…

What if I need top performance? The only real alternatives are JavaFX or moving off the browser completely (native app). Despite many man-years put into optimisation, JavaScript is still nowhere near in performance. Yeah, I know in some lucky microbenchmarks from Google or Mozilla it can be only 2-4x slower than Java and it is pretty impressive but why do many real JavaScript games/programs struggle on modern hardware as if it was an old Pentium II (see: bombermine [1], quake JS demo [2], circuitlab [3]) or Java applet in year 1998? The only thing that make them look acceptable is that hardware is extremely fast these days.

[1] about 25 FPS with random hiccups on my Core i7 Quad @ 2.4-3.5 GHz and proprietary NVidia drivers and Google Chrome

[2] https://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/quake-shows-java...

[3] about 100x slower than old Berkeley Spice (early 90s technology), despite much less accurate models and using similar algorithms (sparse LU decomposition + Newton Raphson)

Re: In Firefox 24 and following, mark all versions of Java as unsafe

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their PDF replacement is far from good - buggy and unusable. We have to show PDF documents to our customers directly in browser, so we need good UX, and it was disappointing to see how it works in FF compared to other browsers with Reader and how much effort do we need to fix it. I'm not surprised they screwed up with Java too.

It works great for me, better than Chrome PDF Viewer. Chrome's viewer lacks even the most basic features like table of contents, and it's integrated pretty poorly -- it doesn't show the title of pdf (so PDFs are impossible to search by title in history), and it doesn't remember last reading position.

Works-for-me approach is good if you are choosing the solution for the systems you are administrating. If you have to deal with customer setups, things usually get much worse. The fact is that we've got degraded UX for our customers with one of the FF updates, because they are not IT professionals and they have chosen FF by someone's advice, not after competent analysis of different solutions.

Re: In Firefox 24 and following, mark all versions of Java as unsafe

#183
post #113

Does anyone want to write a user-friendly walk-through to help normal users get Java running? I may have the time to assist, though I'm doubtful I could do the whole thing. ScreenLeap has a good start: http://www.screenleap.com/troubleshooting-java The advice they give varies based on the detected browser and OS (as it must) but it's somewhat out of date, and isn't intended for a general audience. The applets on my e…

Could you consider contributing this to http://support.mozilla.org ?

Last night I submitted comments on the Bugzilla bug, and joined the (small) conversation on the dev list. My message is still in moderation, though (it wasn't rude or anything, so I suspect it's just because of time differences).

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2013-October/...

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