3aIT Blog

Oracle (current owners of the previously ubiquitous Java browser plugin) have announced that they will shortly be discontinuing all support for this now, mostly redundant, plugin.

While most people were probably unaware that they were using Java at all when browsing a website, the little coffee cup icon popping up near the clock was the telltale sign that the website you were looking at was using this technology. Far more obvious was its constant nags to update!

However, Google disabled the use of this plugin entirely last year, and Mozilla (authors of Firefox) will shortly be doing the same.

While most people will probably not notice the demise of this plugin, it has in the past been widely used as part of company intranets and various web based systems. If you have an aging system that currently needs the Java plugin to function, it may be time to start looking at ways to upgrade it to use other technologies. Once support is dropped altogether, you will soon be forced into a position of not only having to run the now insecure plugin itself, but also to run it on an old, insecure browser, as newer browser versions will not allow the plugin to run.