Apple says no Java for you, removes plugin from browsers on OS X 10.7 and up
engadget.com
engadget.com
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/apple-removes-java-from...
They still provide Java for applications like CrashPlan, Minecraft, or JungleDisk which need it.
They have released some detailed graphics of the new rendering engine in HTML5 and what I assume is Javascript and the results are fairly spectacular, much more clarity and the improvement is at least partially visible, it just remains to see if it will run as fast as RS2.
I should however clarify, the back end will still be a mixture of Java, with C++ strapped on top where needed.
Currently it stands at about 110,000-140,000 people on at once per night, which while being no mean number itself, consists of a large number of bots, or computerized players, programmed to perform tasks which generate in game money to be sold to legitimate players on external websites.
The % of bots was said at the last RuneFest to be around the 30% mark, but since most players have used some form of botting program in the past, it is more likely to be around 50%.
Over the years, there has been a lot of turmoil in game, from free trade and the wilderness being removed, to it being reinstated, to the release of pay-for-perks via the squeal of fortune, a relatively new money making venture by JaGex, instigated by the new owners (Possibly named MMG, I can't remember off the top of my head) whereby players can buy spins on a virtual wheel of fortune, with prizes ranging from experience lamps, to 50 coins, to rare items and weapons (in a form which may not be sold) all the way up to 200,000,000 coins (which admittedly is extremely rare.)
The culmination of these changes has resulted in a player backlash, whereby the forums (and not just the 'rant' forum) are constantly filled with topics and players complaining, wishing the game was how it used to be.
Adding to this, several staff who felt strongly about the future of the game, also being players themselves, quit their positions at the company, including the CEO. (There is a much longer story and this is very watered down.)
But to give a proper response: The game is still very much existential, though internally, it is filled with anger and cheating.
~
I am in no way affiliated with JaGex, I know some of the staff use HN and I don't want to get any of them in trouble, the new owners tend to act first and think later.
a) I needed a unix based desktop
b) I needed end user components (browser, printing, etc.) that just worked
Circa 2008, everything in Safari "just worked" - every site, every player, every piece of embedded bullshit on every little web 2.0 site blah blah blah.
But now I need to manually futz around with flash every two weeks to keep it working ... and now java as well ?
I think OSX still has an edge for me, in terms of getting things done, due to printing and ... ? It's getting awfully close to even, though.
Then began the hell of trying to do anything "unixy" on OSX. Custom libraries just for the mac (custom libev??), needing to install XCode Dev Tools to get gcc compiler(???). Sigh.
In the end I just ended up running a CentOS VM in virtualbox, and I do my development there. The ONLY benefit I currently gain from a Mac is creating iOS apps.
I tried to use LLVM's libc++ instead but I had to recompile so many libraries and make sure the dynamic linker actually picks them up that it was just too big of a hassle. I don't see light at the end of that tunnel right now.
I'm thinking of giving Linux another try as a development platform.
They are shipping a heavily modified GCC that originally was forked in 2008. The version of GCC they ship is entirely based on LLVM via Clang and is intended to be a hold-over for everything to transition to Clang over LLVM.
It sounds like you weren't using MacPorts or Homebrew to build your libraries. They're a lot closer to the distributions you see on Linux and BSD.
Not true, even if you consider only Microsoft software.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=8279
And if my project involves heavy use of shared libraries, I'll take cygwin over macports any day.
How is cygwin any better than a package manager like MacPorts or Homebrew?
If you're having this much trouble with shared libraries, you're doing something quite odd. They're usually less obnoxious than their equivalent .DLL files.
Apple has gone to great lengths to get fully POSIX certified. As far as the libraries go, they're nearly identical to their Linux or BSD counterparts. The number of platform-specific issues you'll have to deal with when using standard versions of the libraries are usually small.
In looking through open source, I always see a lot more of `#ifdef WINDOWS` than I do for anything OS X specific, especially in the networking and threading departments.
You should be using homebrew: it's been a LONG time since I've needed to do anything unusual to get most OSS web & media apps built. "brew install libev" and get on with life.
So a crap GUI, crippled CLI, very questionable company policies and politics and to top it off it costs twice as much as everything else. You have to be out of your mind to buy into this.
This has been standard for many years: Command-Tab switches applications, Command-` switches windows within an app. If that doesn't work, it's because an application vendor has taken specific measures to break it - something which is possible on any platform and should be reported as a bug.
As for doing Unix work, again, this is just griping: you're blaming OS X for things which you either didn't learn or where the upstream vendor has hard-coded Linux-isms, which is increasingly rare. The combination of the command-line developer tools and homebrew means that for most people running linux in a VM useful only for final validation testing.
I agree there are crippled parts to OSX's CLI, but would be curious to know which bits you think are crippled? As from your other assertions, I suspect they are shallow.
Is this actually the case? I use Linux as my primary OS, but I recall seeing xmonad running in osx on a macbook.
Most Mac users (including myself) make no regular use of any X11 app.
(In fact, shortcomings in X11 and software that relies on X11 are the main reasons I left Linux in the first place).
I don't understand how the java plugin is an issue. It's been disabled on all my machines for the last 4 years, and I don't remember any instance where I'd have whished to enable that thing.
Need to move and update your registered address? Java
Need to file your taxes? Java
Need to check your last paycheck, insurance statement? Java
Want to gamble through the national gambling provider? Java
As stated by others: Need to check your bank account? Java
However, using a java applet to login is slow and painful. Maybe this move my Apple will increase support costs and encourage these govt agencies to drop the java requirement.
Here's a few areas I've used it recently:
* HP integrated Lights Out (i.e. your server appears dead, you fire up a browser, gets a java applet with direct access to the server/bios) * My bank. Seems most online banking here in Europe use java applets. This is a common case. There's millions of people, non-tech people, that wants online access to their bank. * Provisioning a point to point radio link (the management app was a Java webapp - started with java web start, not an applet though)
Can you be more specific about needing to "manually futz around with flash every two weeks"? I'm guessing you mean software updates, but I have a hard time believing that Flash stops working unless you update it. If you don't value the added security of having Flash updates decoupled from OS X releases, then you can just tell Flash to stop prompting you to update (or better, just tell it to do so automatically).
Probably something to do with ads, random joe videos have a high success rate and videos from the youtube front page low.
Also, there is more video on the internet than youtube and vimeo, there is decent software done in flash (such as balsamiq mockups) and sometimes it's the only way to get to some content.
I have flash disabled with click2play and I end up starting it _at least_ once a day.
That's entirely a limitation imposed by JavaScript not supporting keyboard access. We'd rather not rely on Flash, but we have to in this case.
Anyway, I was being facetious, but that does show there are things you can do currently with flash|java|whatever that you can't do with JS.
Obviously I'll be happier when it's possible to do everything only with JS.
That said these are not really reasons to switch operating systems, there's nothing particularly difficult about using chrome or Firefox on Linux, or for that matter, printing.
Just disable Flash in Safari until Adobe has a Chrome-level automatic update mechanism. I use Chrome for precisely that reason - I haven't had to think about Flash since they started packaging it. I've had Flash disabled in Safari for a long time and almost everything works without it - the only thing I notice regularly missing are the copy/paste convenience helpers on sites like bit.ly.
As for Java, I have exactly one site where I need to run it - the Web100 NDT testers - and that's both a niche case and hardly compelling versus the security considerations of using a product from a recklessly inattentive maintainer.
Of course, they were already installing the Java plugin but disabling it by default; not sure why they needed to take the extra step of removing the plugin completely.
People say this sort of thing a lot, and obviously with some justification.
However, it's not as if the browsers themselves have a great track record on security either. Firefox had to yank their last update shortly after making it available because of a severe problem, and the update was itself intended to fix quite a few serious security vulnerabilities. Every month we get around to update day for Windows and there are typically a handful of security fixes for IE pushed out. And so on.
It seems fairly clear by now that no-one actually makes a really secure browser yet, with or without plug-ins. It's just a problem that we haven't yet learned to solve, at least not without sacrificing some other benefit that the teams making mainstream browsers value more and choose to prioritise.
If we need independent security tools to keep browsing safe anyway, is avoiding plug-ins any more than a modest improvement?
(And I write this as someone who did once get hit by an undisclosed and unpatched exploit in Java, resulting in a complete reinstall. It wasn't fun. But I don't suppose it would have been any more fun if it had been a zero-day vulnerability in the browser itself.)
IIRC, the last non-Java security update I installed updated a bunch of image format libraries to fix exploitable vulnerabilities. We can't even safely decode static image files! I'm not sure how we expect to safely sandbox executable code, whether it's Flash, Java, Javascript, or anything else.
Even so, if Java's currently being exploited on a wide scale and Oracle's not having the greatest luck fixing the problems letting malware in, it seems prudent to direct people away from it unless they really, really need it.
Any well may be poisoned, but if you know this one is you'd avoid it and warn others, wouldn't you?
At that point, making Java "just work as long as you click somewhere to confirm you want it to" seems a reasonable policy to me. As many here have pointed out, reports of the death of Java applets serving useful purposes have been greatly exaggerated.
How dump could Sun and Oracle (I know, the browser Java fight was maybe already lost when Oracle came in...) be not to realize the potential ecosystem that could grow around this? Sigh...
The benefit of compiling to JS is that it will Just Work for users as long as they have a web browser, without you having to put up "Oh, get a different hardware device" message.
However, I'm of the understanding that in Europe, a lot of bank websites use Java applets as their primary way to do online banking, in which case I can see this decision affecting a lot of people.
(WebEx has a totally pointless Java applet that only serves to launch the native client app.)
The very-popular SmartSource coupon website uses Java to enable users to print coupons. That's the only thing my household has needed Java for in the last year, but it's high priority for my wife.
And I haven't seen a Java applet for months. A concert ticket seller had one for seat placement.
I also did not install Flash for Safari, it's a little annoying when you encounter videos, but for that I change into Chrome. A little Safari extention helps to activate html5 videos from youtube and they run smoother than the Flash versions.
"Chrome does not support Java 7. Java 7 runs only on 64-bit browsers and Chrome is a 32-bit browser.
If you download Java 7, you will not be able to run Java content in Chrome and will need to use a 64-bit browser (such as Safari or Firefox) to run Java content within a browser. Additionally, installing Java 7 will disable the ability to use Apple Java 6 on your system."
So now it looks like I'll have to flip over to firefox if I want to use a site that requires the java plugin - kind of a nuisance.
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=18323
"Snow Leopard will be released in less than 2 months. I believe we should start testing a 64bit version of Chrome so it can be ready when SL ships."
Their argument is YAGNI.
YAGNI is that kind of dismissive argument that it's not even funny
So then if Apple/MS/a linux distro or somebody else shuts down 32-bit binaries they'll be coming with millions of excuses for their incompetence
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/16.0.1/linux-x86_64/
Will try this later, as I had to install several 32-bit libs to use the 32-bit version on Fedora 64-bit
It is when it's the only process requiring and loading up a slew of 32-bit dylibs.
And if none of them were opened using window.open.
And a bunch of other restrictions.
And Oracle is no better, making changes as "security updates" that have no pre-release, which is fine in theory but in practice has tended to break our app.
Other than that I can only see this move as a plus for internet security.
That's a pretty broad generalization. As Java+Scala programmer I personally seldom use, see or write Java applets. Advocating against the use of Java in general is just silly however. Java (+other JVM languages) is very well suited to backend systems, and with the addition of modern web frameworks like Play it's pretty good choice for frontend work too. Java (+other JVM languages) is used heavily by companies like Google, Amazon, Twitter etc.
> At the risk of sounding a bit ridiculous
You do indeed sound ridiculous, especially since it's just Apple no longer maintaining their own Java plugin, but letting customers install the official plugin from Oracle, just like customers do for every other major operating system.