Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better • Hacker News Board

Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

#31

Post by jauntywundrkind » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 9:07 AM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #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 insan…

Applets also had no view-source.

Spiritually the web ought to be more than an application development platform. We haven't been doing great about that (with heavily compiled js bundles), but there's still a lot of extensions that many users take for granted. I'm using a continual wordcount extension (50 words so far), and Dark Reader right now.

Applet's are the native app paradigm, where what the app-makers writes is what you get, never a drop more. It's not great. The internet, the land of protocols, deserved better. Is so interesting because it is better.

Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

#32

Post by kaluga » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 9:08 AM UTC

What’s funny about the “death of applets” is that it highlights a pattern we keep seeing: the browser killed plugins… and then reinvented everything they enabled, but properly this time.

TeaVM and similar toolchains show that the original idea behind applets wasn’t wrong — the implementation model was. Moving Java to JS/WASM with tree-shaking, minification, and real browser APIs gives you all the benefits without the security nightmare.

The interesting takeaway isn’t nostalgia for applets, but how mature the web stack has become: the browser is finally the runtime applets always wanted.

Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

#33

Post by jeroenhd » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 9:10 AM UTC

another_twist wrote: post #10

jakozaur wrote: post #4

Not 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 thos…

The article literally links to a frontend that does just that, run the JVM on top of WASM. It performs fine: https://teavm.org/gallery.html

I'm not sure if I'd use it for a website or anything, but if my goal was to embed a simulation or complex widget, I wouldn't ignore it as an option.

Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

#34

Post by eru » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 9:10 AM UTC

another_twist wrote: post #9

epistasis wrote: post #3

The 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 f…

Mostly agreed that Java, warts and all, has gotten better, and will stick around. It's the new COBOL, for better or worse. (I still wouldn't want to use it voluntarily, but if someone pays me enough money, sure.)

However:

> 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.

The global financial system moves so much money around that comparisons to GDP are a bit silly. Financial transactions dwarf GDP by so much that even a bit player of a technology will facilitate more transactions than global GDP.

(And that's fine. Many of these transactions are offsetting, and that it's a sign of an efficient market that the mispricings are so small that participants needs giant gross flows to profit from them.

Somewhat related: a single high capacity fire hose (at about 75kg of water per second) moves about the same number of electrons as you'd need to power the total US electricity consumption at 120V. Obviously, your fire hose also sprays plenty of pesky protons which completely offset the electrical current from the electrons.)

Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

#35

Post by bhaak » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 9:10 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #3

The 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…

The JVM proved to the mainstream that a virtual machine good be as fast (sometimes even faster) than a compiled binary. Because of that it took a lot of the market share of C/C++ in the 90s.

You got a buffer overflow safe language without compromise of speed. After it has been loaded, of course. But that's why Java had such a tremendous effect in Web services where the load times are negligible to the run time.

Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

#36

Post by eru » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 9:14 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #15

another_twist wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

There's zero sarcasm in my comment. The JVM is quite different from Java language features or Scala language features. I've written entire programs in JVM bytecode, without a compiler, and I see very little of value in it. A stack based machine? Why? Not a huge blocker, it's weird, but usable. The poor engineering around the JVM for many use cases? That's a blocker for me, and where are the alternatives in implementa…

> Java may be used a lot, but so is Windows. It's an accident of history, of early adoption and network effects, rather than being inherently good technology.

Going on a tangent: Windows is an interesting example to bring up, because the Windows versions everyone uses today have about as much to do with the 'accident of history / early adoption' versions that were based on DOS as using Wine on Linux has.

It would perhaps be like today's JVM being register based, when the first version were stack based.

I don't actually know how much the JVM has changed over time.

Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

#37

Post by jeroenhd » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 9:14 AM UTC

petesergeant wrote: post #27

kstrauser wrote: post #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 insan…

I would attribute this much more to Mobile Safari saying "no", which killed off plugins, especially Flash. Java Applets were essentially slow Flash from a user's perspective.

I don't think Safari mattered much. Java was still used for things that wouldn't work on phones without massive redesigns anyway.

I doubt you'd have been able to bootstrap Runescape in any form, even rewritten in native code, on the first iPhone to support apps. Applets worked fine on desktops and tablets which was what they were designed for.

Browser vendors killed the API because when they looked at crashes, freezes, and performance opportunities, the Flash/Java/etc. API kept standing out. Multithreaded rendering became practical only after the old extension model was refactorerd and even then browsers were held down by the terrible plugin implementations they needed to work around.

Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

#38

Post by eru » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 9:15 AM UTC

bhaak wrote: post #35

epistasis wrote: post #3

The 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…

The JVM proved to the mainstream that a virtual machine good be as fast (sometimes even faster) than a compiled binary. Because of that it took a lot of the market share of C/C++ in the 90s. You got a buffer overflow safe language without compromise of speed. After it has been loaded, of course. But that's why Java had such a tremendous effect in Web services where the load times are negligible to the run time.

Of course, eliminating buffer overflows is orthogonal to using a virtual machine.

Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

#39

Post by panny » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 9:15 AM UTC

>shrink the generated code and obfuscate the intent, to complicate reverse-engineering

Says that like it's a good thing.

Re: Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

#40

Post by geokon » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 9:15 AM UTC

Wouldn't it make more sense to run/emulate JVM bytecode on WASM instead of compiling Java to WASM? It seems like that'd be a much easier task.

From a high level WASM and JVM byte code seems incredibly similar (though I'm sure the containerizing and IO are radically different). I never really understood why WASM wasn't some JVM subset/extension.

Not an expert at all in this, so genuinely curious to hear from someone who understands this space well