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I remember Java applets, and reading this thread it's hard to square the revisionist nostalgia with those experiences. The Java applets I remember absolutely su
by tdeck 10y ago
I remember Java applets, and reading this thread it's hard to square the revisionist nostalgia with those experiences. The Java applets I remember absolutely sucked as a user. They took forever to load, had weird clunky UIs that were out of place in the host OS and the browser, constantly broke due to compatibility issues, and had no concept of graceful degradation. There's a reason Java applets lie in the dustbin of history - good riddance to them, it's where they belong!
- throwawaysbdi 10y agoThe rose tinting of HTML should also be taken into account. Java was maybe 10x slower in those days, but more importantly internet was 100x slower and computers 500x slower. Java ran pretty damn good for what it pulled off back then. It would have been orders of magnitude easier to make Java into what we have today than it was to bastardize HTML and JS to be usable. Java these days uses native UI which looks nicer and is much faster than in-browser rending. Graceful degredation is only needed because some browsers are such crap. This was never a big problem in Java and still isn't. If a JVM supports JDK 8 you can expect it to run java 8 apps reliably Java seems like a resource hog because it will use spare ram when you've got it, but most apps run fine on around 15mb of ram. Less if you use AOT compilation. Modern webapps use around 50-100.
- flukus 10y agoYes they were slow and clunky, but they ran on computers with 100Mhz processors and 8/16MB of RAM. I doubt you could load a chrome tab on that. > had weird clunky UIs that were out of place in the host OS and the browser Just like web apps, the may be prettier, but they look just as out of plus with custom widgets everywhere and complete disregard for the desktop theme. Hell, for some reason chrome added that shitty task bar color attribute that allows a web page to alter the desktop (well mobile top) theme.
- beagle3 10y agoYes, but the competition at the time was HTML (slowly getting interactive with time, and mostly ugly, but fast and dependable), and Flash -- and Flash was way faster, way more compact, and way more prevalent than Java. So, Java wasn't ahead of its time, and it was much much worse than Flash (which, despite numerous efforts to kill it, is still alive, unlike Java Applets which have essentially been dead for years).
- flukus 10y agoI don't think flash was much better at anything interactive, or at least animated. On the same hardware as above I remember "frog in a blender" could render well south of 1FPS, on a 486/686 (outdated but still in common use) it was more like 0.1FPS. Too be fair though, it's a hard comparison, applets were generally apps while flash was fancy graphics.
- bjbXXX 10y agoJava could have worked fine in the browser. All feature phones (which are/were almost universally less powerful than a desktop PC) were able to run Java ME applications just fine. My memory from the mid/late nineties is that Microsoft wanted to balkanise Java with J++ (or was it J# ?) and got into a big argument with Sun, and because of this and the fact they eventually came to own the browser market there was no way they'd embed a JVM in the browser.
- tannhaeuser 10y agoIronically, MS browsers remain the only ones to support Applets today.
- douche 10y agoSun/Oracle also took about a five year hiatus after Java 6, and let the platform languish during a critical period.