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Why are applets obsolete?

 
Greenhorn
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About applets, I can't say I've heard a major virus infecting from applets, yet applet web sites have dissappeared one by one. Many gaming sites that used applets are gone or have replaced the technology with javascript /ajax / html5. e.g. playok.com I believe replaced all their games, the other two sites I used for gaming, yahoo games and blip.se completely stopped serving. And the sites left, have to deal with java runtime requiring you to go into a control panel and add the site to your setting instead of just hitting run.

I think flash and silverscript going same way. iphone did not allow flash webpages etc..

of course, there was a paradigm change coming with vista, with user access control and security. Is it that applets break that barrier, or what is exactly prompting not using applets anymore?
 
Rancher
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_applet#Security

That gives a fairly good overview of what the issues were.
Since many of those old gaming sites only had unsigned, or self signed, certificates they were not ina  position to move to proper signed ones (cost).

For Oracle, the simplest was to tighten the security, a result of which was people ditching Applets.
 
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Applets never stood a chance. Originally, thanks to Microsoft's sulking about its failure to take over Java, you had to download a JVM before you you could run an applet and back then a JVM download at, say, 28k baud was not something you'd do on a whim.

By the time bandwidth was commonly wide enough to allow such a thing all sorts of applet exploits started opening up. In the mean time, actually getting a signed applet to run was more than you could expect of a casual user, especially in a controlled business environment.

Applets aren't literally "obsolete", but no one wants to touch them. JavaScript provides many of the same capabilities, but with fewer people worrying about it.

Fortunately, you can use Java Web Start to do almost the same thing if you need client-side Java code badly enough.
 
Anton Mo
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thank you that was helpful
 
Java Cowboy
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Applets are going to be obsolete when Java 9 comes out, because Oracle will stop distributing and supporting the Java browser plug-in.

See this blog post from Oracle for more info: Moving to a Plugin-Free Web
 
Anton Mo
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wow thank you Jesper.
 
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