grahamedgecombe

For signed applets which get full privileges anyway, yes, Java will prompt you to accept the certificate. However, Java does not prompt before running unsigned applets (which run with limited privileges), and the actual security issue allows unsigned applets to gain more privileges than they should have. So, unfortunately, the prompt doesn't help.

It often leads people to write code like this:

    try {
        // do stuff
    } catch (TheCheckedException ex) {
        // ignore it
    }

then the code continues even though it could be in a bad state if an exception did occur.

It's a much better solution to let it propagate up the call stack until it can be dealt with appropriately (e.g. by ending the application, giving a 503 error on a web page request, etc.) Unchecked exceptions will propagate up the call stack by default if you don't do anything, making it harder for people to write bad exception handling code.

I don't think it does that any more in recent versions of Chrome. There is an 'onbeforeload' event which can block the ads before they start loading.

It's a shame browsers focus so much on JavaScript performance. I tried FF4 a few weeks ago and the user interface itself just feels slow whereas Chrome's interface is much snappier. It'd be great if all of the browser vendors realised that JavaScript doesn't tell the whole story!