Stewart Stremler wrote:
begin quoting Christian Seberino as of Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 08:14:08PM -0700:
not sure why Java didn't take over the client side since it has such a
head start.
It's from Sun, so Microsofties hated it and RMSofties hated it.
And the sandbox was too effective for many webheads. "What do you mean
I can't do _that_?"
Bingo.
IMO, this was the main one. Basically, you couldn't do anything useful
without explicitly authorizing the Java applet using a dialog box. You
couldn't touch the network; you couldn't touch the hard drive.
From a security point of view, this is *good*. There is a reason I run
Firefox with AdBlock and NoScript. I don't want others to access my
computer without my knowledge. Take a look at the Flash preferences
sometime. Note the Microphone and Webcam icons? Do you really want
people to be able to access your microphone and webcam from Flash?
Of course, from a usability standpoint, not being able to do anything to
the computer *sucks*. You can't make YouTube in a Java applet without
nasty dialogs; you can in Flash. You can't make an iTunes in a Java
applet without nasty dialogs, you can in Flash. etc.
Yet another example of the users being willing to turn over the security
of their machine for the tiniest of conveniences.
However ...
That wasn't the only reason. On the developer side, Flash does
animation. Java doesn't. Now, it does so by soaking up 100% of the CPU
on your machine, but it does animation.
The Flash authoring tools work very much like the video editing tools
that the visual arts people already know. There is no such equivalent
on the Java side.
If anyone wants to stop the continuing rise of Flash, one of the things
they would have to do is put together an open source project that
converts Macromedia Director projects directly into Java or Javascript.
However, I don't see Adobe open-sourcing the specification to *that*.
Oops.
I just want to smack the web heads some days, though. We are just
starting to emerge from the Bad Old Days(tm) of single company dominance
on the web thanks to Firefox finally having a large enough share to
punch Microsoft. And they want to hand the keys to the kingdom back
over to another proprietary monopoly.
They never learn.
And so it goes ...
-a
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