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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

#81

Post by ssl-3 »

troupo wrote: post #68
jeroenhd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the old games and movies still play back well with Ruffle installed ( https://ruffle.rs/ ). Newgrounds embeds it by default for old interactive flash media that they couldn't convert directly to video. It's not a perfect fit, but it works. The speed of Ruffle loading on a page is similar to that of Flash initializing, so you can arguably still make flash websites and animations to get the old look and feel if…

It's good that we have the runtime to run old Flash games. What we lost is an extremely easy environment for authoring/creating them. Nothing has come even close since Flash. Not just game, but any kind of interactions and animations on the web.

Where did the tools go?

Can a person not run Flash authoring tools with an era-appropriate operating system in a VM or something?

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

#83

Post by lenkite »

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…

> There are still so many rough edges that they never even bothered to try to fix about launching a .jar with classpath dependencies.

Feels like you are still living in year 2010 ?

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

#84

Post by MarsIronPI »

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.

At least with WASM I'm not stuck using Javascript whether I like it or not. Yes, transpiling to Javascript is a thing, but it's not too much better, since transpiled code isn't much more readable than WASM (see also ClojureScript; CoffeScript isn't too bad though, but it's almost equivalent to JS).

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

#85

Post by iamcreasy »

rimmontrieu wrote: post #60

+1 TeaVM is crazily good. Comparing to GWT it has faster build time and better exports to javascript. I've built so many games using libGDX + TeaVM and quite happy with the workflow and results. Here's one of many: https://ookigame.com/game/flappy-bug/

Do you have to rewrite GLSL shaders when migrating a game from desktop to browser?

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

#86

Post by cogman10 »

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…

A coworker of mine that worked at Adobe through the death of flash said a big reason for that death was Apple deciding the Ipod touch Safari would not support plugins.

Adobe had big plans on the Ipod supporting Flash and that announcement all but killed their Flash division.

Yes, Adobe supported Flash for years after that, but it was more of a life support thing and not active development. They saw the writing on the wall and knew that for flash to survive, it had to survive in a mobile world.

With the decreased support of flash, the other browser devs simply followed suit and killed off a route for something like Flash running in a browser.

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

#87

Post by kirb »

kergonath wrote: post #72
ozgung wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Web engines were honestly not great back then. WebKit was ok but JavaScriptCore was very slow, and of course that’s what iOS, Android, and BB10 were all running on that slow hardware. I have distinct (bad) memories that even “GPU-accelerated” CSS animations were barely 15fps, while native apps reliably got 60fps unless they really messed up. That’s on top of the infamous 300ms issue, where every tap took 300ms to fire off because it was waiting to see if you were trying to double-tap.

So I really think some of the blame is still shared with Apple, although it’s hard to say if that’s because of any malicious intent to prop up the App Store, or just because they were under pressure to build out the iOS platform that there wasn’t enough time to optimise. I suspect it was both.

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

#88

Post by butvacuum »

kergonath wrote: post #72
ozgung wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I will never forget the hubub around the discovery that everything you typed on android went to a root shell. "What should I do?"... "reboot" phone reboots

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

#89

Post by rimmontrieu »

iamcreasy wrote: post #85
rimmontrieu wrote: post #60

+1 TeaVM is crazily good. Comparing to GWT it has faster build time and better exports to javascript. I've built so many games using libGDX + TeaVM and quite happy with the workflow and results. Here's one of many: https://ookigame.com/game/flappy-bug/

Do you have to rewrite GLSL shaders when migrating a game from desktop to browser?

Browsers only support OpenGL ES so only if your shaders use any OpenGL specific features you have to rewrite. Otherwise, it's just plain simple to export to both desktop and browser targets.
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