Flash -vs- Applets

[Ross Werner]

On Wed, 15 Nov 2006 22:50:00 -0800, Bryan Sant <bryan.sant at gmail.com>  
wrote:
> On 11/15/06, Ross Werner <rosswerner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I just loaded a page (in Firefox) with a relatively simple Java  
>> applet--it
>> pegged my CPU at 100% for several minutes, froze the browser, and still
>> failed to successfully load the applet. I had to killall firefox-bin.
>> That's why I hate Java applets. An applet should *not* cause my browser  
>> to
>> crash, even if it's a malicious applet, first of all (which this  
>> wasn't).
>> Second, they should download quickly and open quickly. Preferably with
>> some sort of notification of how far along they are, like most Flash  
>> does.
>
> Could you send the URL of that applet?

http://cryptio.net/~shane/ssh/sshterm-applet.htm

I tried again now when pasting it to you and it loads successfully rather  
than crashing the browser. But it still pegs the CPU at 100% for a good 30  
seconds or so. I see absolutely no reason why this should happen. And  
although Java-crashing-the-browser doesn't happen every time, it happens  
often enough to make it annoying.

	~ Ross

p.s. in case you haven't noticed from my other posts, I'm a big Java fan.  
99% of the problems with applets are (IMO) on the browser side, not with  
Java, so it's not the language that I'm bashing. :-) And they are in fact  
solvable, I believe. I think it's theoretically possible to get Java  
applets to be as inobtrusive to the web browser (less, even) than Flash,  
without changing the language one bit. It's just that nobody seems to have  
any interested in making that happen.