14 DAY TRIAL // After Mozilla said in October that it would stop supporting Firefox plugins on the older NPAPI technology, Oracle had no choice now but to announce the deprecation of the Java browser plugin starting with the release of the JDK (Java Development Kit) version 9.
Oracle, which indirectly acquired Java when it purchased Sun Microsystems back in 2010, has been busy lately suing Google for its usage of Java APIs in the Android mobile operating system.
Java, a constant source of security issues
This focus on monetizing Java - but not keeping up with security updates, which have plagued the technology - has slowly driven developers and users away from the platform.
Most recently, in Oracle's January CPU (Critical Patch Update), Oracle fixed eight security bugs in Java, but three of them were labeled as critical importance. Despite its smaller and smaller role in Oracle's portfolio, the platform keeps churning out critical security bugs on a regular basis.
This is one of the reasons why when Firefox decided to stop supporting NPAPI plugins, only Flash got a pass, due to its higher market share but also due to Adobe's dedication to fixing security bugs on a monthly basis, not once every three months, like Oracle.
But don't think that Flash is in a better position. This past December, Adobe rebranded the Adobe Flash Professional (Flash building app) as Adobe Animate CC and also added alternative support for HTML5, hoping developers would slowly compile Flash content, when possible, into an alternative HTML5 version, thus replacing Flash content but also keeping the userbase hooked on its Creative Cloud IDEs.
Oracle urges developers to migrate to the Java Web Start technology
With Java's browser prospects on a sunsetting path, Oracle made it official yesterday, when it announced it would remove it from JDK 9.
"This technology will be removed from the Oracle JDK and JRE in a future Java SE release," said the company in a statement. "Developers of applications that rely on the Java browser plugin need to consider alternative options such as migrating from Java Applets (which rely on a browser plugin) to the plugin-free Java Web Start technology."
JDK 9 is set to release in March 2017.