My Plea to Oracle: Axe Java Applets | Hacker News Reader

My Plea to Oracle: Axe Java Applets

thexploit.com

11 pointsthexploit20 comments

Nobody except the German tax authorities. As a company in Germany you have to hand in your tax statements electronically. In order to do so you have to go through some weird Applet-based authentication process.

The sooner Oracle axes Applets the sooner the German tax authorities will have to axe their completely messed up software as well. This will take some time, though.

While I completely agree with the underlying sentiment, you can hardly say Applets aren't used anymore.

Yikes!

"I can attest that nobody uses applets anymore"

http://danielrapp.github.com/mcstats-analysis/

Minecraft disagrees - you know, one of the best selling games of the last year or two... 9.4m copies sold. And according to this analysis 33% of people play it in an applet. To me this sounds absolutely insane. But we should never underestimate the insanity of the general populous.

Small percentage but still interesting. Although if this functionality didn't exist, would it really be missed? I suppose these are the people playing on guest computers/at work. Wonder how many of those 33% of people have an up-to-date Java plugin?

Nobody uses Java Applets just like nobody uses Windows XP and IE6.

Java applets are necessary for folder uploads. Right now, only 1 browser supports folder uploads, and that's Google Chrome. All others allow single or multi-file uploads, but not folders. This is a HUGE problem for some medical and document-management use cases. Until folder uploads work natively in other browsers (IE7+, FF, Safari), applets are not only necessary, but essential.

Yes, this is somewhat unfortunate and someone should really light a fire under the HTML5 implementors. However, I wouldn't call it essential since you can archive/zip/tar a bunch of files and upload them all at once and do the processing server side.

Oracle ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), one of the major business software products that Oracle sells to corporations that they do IT consulting for, is fully Applet-based. They're not going to dump Applets because Applets are the framework of their core product.

Yea I'm sure Oracle will do this based upon your plea...not... Do you have any idea what would happen to the internet as we (the world, not just yourself) if we all just stopped supporting applets? I don't think you do.

Yea, I have an idea of what would happen ... we'd have a ton less people getting their boxes easily owned because they visited some webpage and happen to have some old technology installed that they don't ever even use.

If they never use it, then a better solution is for browsers to ship with applets disabled. Or without an applet plugin at all -- if you need it, go install it at your own risk.

As long as there isn't such a thing as PrinterSockets for the browser, Java Applets are the only way we can provide printing services for our clients, because a browser can only send documents for printing and not byte streams, which is what we need in order to use termic printers for adhesive labels.

Why are there so many security vulnerabilities related to Java applets?

I always thought that Java's been specifically designed to sandbox untrusted code, and applets are mature technology: They've been around for 15+ years.

Just disable the plug-in in your browser. Problem solved.

Agreed. Except the common user likely doesn't even know it's enable or how to disable it. Thankfully, Firefox disables by default now.

Off by default is a good step to take today. I can't see eliminating them, but this makes a lot of sense.

The people who know to do that and further know how to do it aren't the bulk of the problem.

Most Brazilian banks still use Java applets - which sometimes don't work in newer browser versions and have odd bugs with 32-/64-bit compatibility.

Last I checked many Norwegian online banking and credit card payment systems use applets.

Somewhat ironic considering you'd think banks would do a security assessment of the technologies they use.

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