Hacker News Reader

Comment by timothya | Hacker News Reader

I don't expect to see much difference in my day-to-day browsing, I can barely remember the last time I encountered a Java applet - most of the time I see them they are some sort of unimportant and old technology demo.

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.

View on HN

Maybe after enough thousands of WebExes get delayed another 15 minutes each, Cisco will take this as a sign.

(WebEx has a totally pointless Java applet that only serves to launch the native client app.)

On the IE side they do this with ActiveX. I always wondered why they did not come up with a simple webex:// uri.

I can barely remember the last time I encountered a Java applet

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.

I recommend downloading and installing the Java plugin yourself then :-)

I haven't seen any Java applets among Deutsche Bank, Sparkasse, Raiffeisenbank.

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.

There just is an infinite list of things wrong with bank websites aren't there.

Interestingly time.gov/ still requires an applet to run. I often find schools and test centers using them because of its accuracy. Wonder why they still haven't switched to javascript yet, maybe "if it ain't broke, don't fix" mindset.

Timing in javascript is pretty poor. The best accuracy you can get is around 0.5 seconds. Given that many tests and testing sites (and psychological instruments, which is why I know) require millisecond (+-10) accuracy, Java is the best tool for this job. Its a sad day for me, this change, even though we fall back to JS the timing simply is not as accurate. This may change with localstorage and access to system API's, but its not there yet.

http://time.is/ claims to get ±0.011 second accuracy for me, and it appears to use JavaScript.

Yes, but it does this by synchronising with an atomic clock from a server. I would want (do want, actually) to be able to run a js file on the browser of a participant and get accurate timing down to perhaps 50 milliseconds. The joy of java is the applet downloads, makes the timings on the local computer and then sends the results back over the server. Involving the network during the process makes it somewhat unreliable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com