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

(frequal.com)
78 points pjmlp | 1 comments | 08 Dec 25 08:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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kstrauser ◴[08 Dec 25 08:28 UTC] No.46189780[source]▶
> 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 insane number of crashes, out-of-memories, pegged CPUs, and security vulnerabilities that pushed things over the edge. You can only sit through so many dozens of Adobe 0-days before it starts to grate.

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maxloh ◴[08 Dec 25 08:50 UTC] No.46189952[source]▶
The "walled gardens" he referred to are in fact based on open standards and open source, while the Applet runtime is not.

Not all of Java is open source. The TCK, the testing suite for standard compliance, for instance, is proprietary, and only organizations with Oracle's blessing can gain access. AdoptOpenJDK was only granted access after they stopped distributing another Java runtime, OpenJ9.

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1. exDM69 ◴[08 Dec 25 09:04 UTC] No.46190041[source]▶
Correct me if I'm wrong but during this timeframe (circa 2005), Java was not open source at all. OpenJDK was announced in 2006 and first release was 2008, by which time the days Java in the browser were more or less over.