Menu
When java was young, people were excited about writing applets. They were cool and popular, for a little while. Now, I never see them anymore. Instead we have flash, javascript, and a plethora of other web app-building technologies.
Why don't sites use java applets anymore?
I'm also curious: historically, why do you think this occurred? What could have been done differently to keep Java applets alive?
490
Support for running Applets in browsers was only possible while browser vendors were committed to standards-based plugins. With that no longer being the case, Applet support ended in March 2019. Oracle announced in January 2016 that Applets would be deprecated in Java SE 9, and the technology was removed in Java SE 11.
You can still relive the heyday of Java applets through UltraStudio, an online museum of educational applets, but Java has been mostly replaced by Flash and JavaScript for creating interactive programs on the web.
No, there isn't. Java Applets are dead and there is no viable way to run them for the vast majority of users on the public Internet.
Beginning in 2013, major web browsers began to phase out support for the underlying technology applets used to run, with applets becoming completely unable to be run by 2015–2017. Java applets were deprecated by Java 9 in 2017.
I think Java applets were overshadowed by Flash and ActionScript (pun unintended), being much easier to use for what Java Applets were being used at the time (animations + stateful applications).
Flash's success in this respect in turn owes to its much smaller file sizes, as well as benefiting from the Sun vs. Microsoft suit that resulted in Microsoft removing the MSJVM from Internet Explorer, at a time of Netscape's demise and IE's heavy dominance.
119
1) AWT made for horrid UIs. Swing improved on that but it was too late, because...
2) Microsoft dropped support for Java in the browser (its propietary MSJVM), and before it did, it would only support the last version it released, which was roughly JDK 1.1 compatible.
3) So today you cannot be sure that an applet will run on the majority of non-developer machines, unlike flash.
Same can be said of ActiveX by the way.
44
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
