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

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

#71

Post by elric »

kaluga wrote: post #32

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…

> reinvented everything they enabled, but properly this time

"Properly"? I'm not convinced. Browsers have grown incredibly large and complex. Every plugin it replaced by JS-based APIs has become a security nightmare in almost exactly the same way as the plugin based approach. Browsers have a lot of features, but if they were implemented "properly", the user would have far more control than they do now. The cynic in me thinks that many of these features are mostly there to facilitate ad-tech and user tracking. From fingerprintable canvas to access to devices.

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

#72

Post by kergonath »

ozgung wrote: post #64
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…

For Flash vs iPhone case, it was indeed mostly politics. People were using Flash and other plugins in websites because there were no other alternative, say to add a video player or an animation. iPhone was released in 2007 and app store in 2008. iPhone and iPad did not support then popular Flash in their browsers. Web experience was limited and broken. HTML5 was first announced in 2008 but would be under development…

That is almost entirely backwards.

> For Flash vs iPhone case, it was indeed mostly politics.

It was politics in the sense that Flash was one of the worst cause of instability in Safari on OS X, and was terrible at managing performance and a big draw on battery life, all of which were deal breakers on the iPhone. This is fairly well documented.

> iPhone was released in 2007 and app store in 2008. iPhone and iPad did not support then popular Flash in their browsers.

There were very good reasons for that.

> Web apps were not a thing without Flash.

That is entirely, demonstrably false. There were plenty of web apps, and they were actually the recommended (and indeed the only one) way of getting apps onto iPhones before they scrambled to release the App Store.

> Flash ecosystem was the biggest competitor and threat for the App Store at that moment.

How could it be a competitor if it was not supported?

> iPhone users stopped complaining

It was not iPhones users who were complaining. It was Android users explaining us how prehistoric iPhones were for not supporting Flash. We were perfectly happy with our apps.

> and in 2011 Adobe stopped the development of mobile plugins.

Yeah. Without ever leaving beta status. Because it was unstable, had terrible performances, and drained batteries. Just what Jobs claimed as reasons not to support it.

> Adobe was in a unique position to dominate the apps era, but they failed spectacularly.

That much is true.

> Plugins were slow but this was mostly due to hardware at the time.

Then, how could native apps have much better performance on the same hardware, on both Android and iOS?

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

#73

Post by theandrewbailey »

wiseowise wrote: post #45
cube00 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> banks to stop using it for online banking apps I never understood why so many banks flocked to building their online banking in applets when it wasn't like you needed anything more advanced than HTML to view balances and make transactions.

Because they’ve hired a bunch of Java devs that don’t know anything outside of Java?

Java Servlets and JSPs output HTML. I've been building a blog with them for over 15 years.

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

#74

Post by forgotpwd16 »

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 still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM.

Running one packaged program across every platform. Write once, run anywhere was Sun's slogan for Java. (Though oftentimes ended up being debug anywhere.) As for the slow start part, programs can either be often-launched short-running or seldom-launched forever-running. Assume because enterprise software falls to the later part (and runtime performance > startup time + memory use), focus was there.

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

#75

Post by kaluga »

elric wrote: post #71
kaluga wrote: post #32

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…

> reinvented everything they enabled, but properly this time "Properly"? I'm not convinced. Browsers have grown incredibly large and complex. Every plugin it replaced by JS-based APIs has become a security nightmare in almost exactly the same way as the plugin based approach. Browsers have a lot of features, but if they were implemented "properly", the user would have far more control than they do now. The cynic in m…

[flagged]

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

#76

Post by kergonath »

masklinn wrote: post #63
jeroenhd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, freeze…

> I don't think Safari mattered much. Apple was the first to publicly call out native plugins (jobs did so on stage) and outright refused to support them on iOS, then everyone else followed suit.

> then everyone else followed suit

There was a Flash runtime on Android. It was terrible. Java applets were already dead anyway, outside of professional contexts, which are not relevant on phones anyway.

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

#77

Post by Sardtok »

another_twist wrote: post #52
eru wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arou…

> The global financial system moves so much money around that comparisons to GDP are a bit silly. Agreed. I guess its comparing production capacity to distribution capacity. Distribution capacity will equal n_tx * tx_amt. Having said that, another metric to look at is how much of software infrastructure is built on Java. Simply adding AWS to this equation proves the value added by Java backed systems. Hard to say tha…

You could easily say the same about C/C++, as the operating systems and most databases are written in the language(s).

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

#78

Post by morshu9001 »

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…

And it hogs all your RAM or runs out of heap space, and online help says to pass more -Xmxwhatever flags that flip it between those two.

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

#79

Post by zihotki »

wiseowise wrote: post #46
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don’t worry, they’re trying to sneak back in with WASM and drawing everything to canvas.

I wish there was a setting in major browsers to disable WASM or at least ask to enable per site

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

#80

Post by kstrauser »

ozgung wrote: post #64
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…

For Flash vs iPhone case, it was indeed mostly politics. People were using Flash and other plugins in websites because there were no other alternative, say to add a video player or an animation. iPhone was released in 2007 and app store in 2008. iPhone and iPad did not support then popular Flash in their browsers. Web experience was limited and broken. HTML5 was first announced in 2008 but would be under development…

The best think Jobs ever did for tech was forcing the whole industry to advance HTML to where it could replace Flash, and killing the market for proprietary browser content plugins. I don’t want to imagine what the web would be like today if Flash had won, and the whole web was a loader for one closed-source, junky plugin.
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