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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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exDM69 ◴[08 Dec 25 08:34 UTC] No.46189829[source]▶
Exactly.

Java was so buggy and had so many security issues about 20 years ago that my local authorities gave a security advisory to not install it at all in end user/home computers. That finally forced the hand of some banks to stop using it for online banking apps.

Flash also had a long run of security issues.

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1. Gravityloss ◴[08 Dec 25 09:05 UTC] No.46190048[source]▶
In the 2000s, my bank was acquired by some bigger bank from another country. Their long standing, well working and fast banking application was replaced with a very dysfunctional Java applet thing. I was using Linux at the time and IIRC it either worked barely, or then not at all. I phoned the bank, and they told about a secret alternate 'mobile' url, that had a proper working service. I used that for a while before ultimately switching to another bank. The bank sent apology letters to customers and waived some fees also as they saw many of them leave. It made me really wake up that to the fact if the company can do these visible level blunders, what else is going on there, and also, how the customer is in such a vulnerable position.

On the other hand, NASA in the past had some really great Java applets to play with some technical concept and get updated diagrams, animations and graphs etc.