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THE JAVA PLUGIN has been a feature of the web since it was introduced 20 years ago.
Originally created as a way to bring multimedia support to browsers like games and animations, it was first included with Netscape Navigator but recent years saw it fall out of favour because of the manysecurity concerns and vulnerabilities that plagued it.
So Oracle, the company behind the plugin, has announced it plans to “deprecate” the Java plugin in September, the month when the next Java Development Kit rolls out. A future release will remove the plugin entirely.
Such an announcement only comes later after many browsers have abandoned it entirely. Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have already dropped support for Java while the makers of Firefox, Mozilla, announced it would be removing support for it.
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That means the only browsers that still support it are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which is on its final version, and Apple’s Safari,
This announcement doesn’t really matter to you if you’re already using Chrome or Edge but those who continue to rely on it for their own sites will have a number of months to make a change before it’s gone for good.
The other major plugin that’s being phased out is Flash, which also suffers from the same problems as Java.
While more sites and browsers are phasing it out, the plugin still holds on although a recent report from Encoding.com predicts it will be gone in two years.
Those using the plugin, like video players and banner ads, have decreased from 21% to 6% in 2015.
I know of a pharmaceutical company that uses a java app like this to upload data from a medical wearable onto their site. I wonder what they will replace it with because a native app will require a bigger team to manage multiple OSes …
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