Goodbye Applets!! Another Cruddy Piece of Web Tech Is Here

Oracle says that it’s discontinuing its Java browser plugin starting with the next big release of the programming language. No, Oracle isn’t killing the Java programming language itself, which is still widely used by many companies. Nor is it killing off JavaScript, which is a completely different language that Oracle doesn’t control. What Oracle is getting rid of is a plugin that allows you to run programs known as “Java applets” in your browser.

You may not think you even have the Java plugin installed, but if you’ve ever installed Java, or if Java came pre-installed on your computer, then you probably do, even if you never use it. The good news is that Oracle won’t be automatically installing the Java plugin when you install Java anymore. The bad news is that it won’t be providing security updates anymore either, so you should go ahead and uninstall it now. In fact, there’s a good chance you can uninstall Java entirely.

Sun Microsystems, which was acquired by Oracle in 2010, introduced Java applets in 1995 and the technology was briefly popular with scientists and educators, who used them to create things such as interactive physics simulators. You can still relive the heyday of Java applets through UltraStudio, an online museum of educational applets, but Java has been mostly replaced by Flash and JavaScript for creating interactive programs on the web.

Unfortunately, it’s managed to stick around, thanks to Oracle’s practice of bundling the plugin with the Java installer. That’s made it a huge target for malware creators, and browser makers have slowly tried to phase the plugin out on their own. Google Chrome stopped supporting the plugin standard on which the Java plugin depends last year, and Mozilla has announced it will do the same by the end of the year. Microsoft Internet Explorer still supports the standard, but the newer Microsoft Edge browser does not.

With Microsoft dropping support for old versions of Internet Explorer and Adobe slowly phasing out Flash, it looks like a nightmarish era for web security is finally drawing to an end.