Java’s rapid rise to

fame 20 years ago began with a tumbling duke applet running in the HotJava browser. Applets allowed richer development

functionality at a time when browser capabilities were very limited, and

provided centralized distribution of applications without requiring users to install

or update applications locally.

HotJava’s support for

applets was picked up by Netscape. In 1995 Netscape Navigator 2.0 and plugins became more popular to expand the

kind of content that could be displayed. Navigator’s plugin interface (NPAPI)

was adopted by other browsers and supported since 2004. Support for Java

applets across several different browsers was implemented relying on the common

NPAPI plugin interface to provide cross-browser compatibility of Java

applications running on the web.

As Java evolved to

become one of the leading mainstream development platforms, so did the applet’s

hosts – the web browsers. The rise of web usage on mobile device

browsers, typically without support for plugins, increasingly led browser makers to

want to restrict and remove plugin support from their products, as they tried

to unify the set of features available across desktop and mobile versions.

Coincidental with the rise of mobile was the emergence of the “app store” model

rather than “plugin based” models for application delivery. The “app

store” model grew for reasons related to simplicity, security, and centralized

availability. Given these evolutions in mobile, delivery, and capabilities, the

set of browsers that continue to support standards based plugins has shrunk

over time.

The announcement from Mozilla

provides a timeline for developers and users who rely on Mozilla Firefox for

applets to evaluate and migrate to alternatives. You should consider using

plugin-free technologies, like Java Web Start, or move to other supported

browsers, before NPAPI functionality is removed from Firefox in their regular

and/or Firefox Extended Support Releases.

As with other browsers,

the Oracle JRE can only support applets on Firefox for as long as Mozilla

provides the requisite NPAPI support. Having been in regular contact with the

Mozilla engineering team over the past years, we have worked together to ensure

that our common users benefit from improvements made in Firefox and the Oracle

JRE. We'll continue to collaborate on enabling a smooth transition to

plugin-free technologies like Java Web Start.

Meanwhile, we don’t plan

to provide additional browser-specific plugins, as such plugins would require

application developers to write browser-specific applets for each browser they wish

to support. Moreover, we would only be able to offer a subset of the required

functionality, different from one browser to the next, impacting both

application developers and users.

As with previous transitions, any additional information specific to Oracle

products will be provided by the corresponding product teams. Internet Explorer

and Safari browsers are not impacted by this change.

System administrators

who want to prepare for the transition and learn more about applets (and other

kinds of Java applications) running inside their organization should evaluate

the Java Advanced Management Console.