We have come full circle #applets
Twenty years ago running java in the browser would have just been called "using the internet"
replies(3):
We have come full circle #applets
Twenty years ago running java in the browser would have just been called "using the internet"
Yep, the original Minecraft ran in the browser in a Java applet so this is particularly fun example. Though obviously there are significant security benefits to the JVM running within the browser's WASM sandbox instead of directly on the host.
> there are significant security benefits to the JVM running within the browser's WASM sandbox instead of directly on the host.
The JVM originally also had the goal of providing a security boundary, and even had a relatively complicated permissions/security model enforced via call stack inspection.
That security model was ultimately too complicated for developers to work with, but I don't think the sandbox itself was particularly insecure.
My recollection is that the SecurityManager was notorious for being relatively easy to work around. Definitely one of the common questions people had when working on the richer HTML5 APIs was "how is your sandboxing going to be more effective than the Java applet model, given that that's known to be full of holes?"
If it had come out of Google or Microsoft maybe even Apple, the JRE would have been integrated into the browser much more efficiently and it would have been no slower than Javascript
But I don't remember Applets being particularly slow even back then, if you had a decent internet connection and they were written by a decent SDE
I wrote a lot of applets back in the day for little graphics experiments and such, somewhat inspired by Ken Perlin's homepage[1]. I found that it's quite possible to make applets that load fast and run fast if you care about those things while building it and do some profiling. If you pull in hundreds of megabytes of libraries and trigger a GC every second then of course it will be slow.
Until they want features and punch holes in the sandbox.
Audio/video codecs are a great example.
Neither decent internet connections nor decent SDEs programming Applets ever happened in the 1990s.
Same. I built a lot of animations with applets back in the day and if you avoided dependencies (other than what ships with the JVM) and your code wasn't ridiculous, you could get some pretty damn good performance out of it (minus initial load time which did tend to be suboptimal, but manageable). Applets were a pain in many ways but I think the tech gets blamed unfairly for bad performance.
It's not full circle. It's using built-in browser capabilities instead of a special sideloaded runtime granted by a browser extension.
An example of full circle would be if wasm apps needed a browser extension so that they could access APIs not allowed by the browser.