Re: Java plugin advocacy
On 5/29/2002 11:07 PM, Rick Lutowski wrote:
The lawsuit was in the Java 1.3 timeframe. Browsers
were stuck at 1.1 years before that. Also, the lawsuit
did not affect Netscape 4.x, which also is stuck at 1.1
(I have heard NS 4.x is 'dead', but it comprises about
20% of the browser market, and they keep releaseing new
versions -- doesn't sound so dead to me! But it remains
stuck at 1.1 also. Go figure).
Exactly - and Netscape was thrown out with the bathwater when the
Mozilla project was re-started from scratch, when, 1998? Only in the
past 6 months or so has Java on Netscape been even vaguely reliable. MS,
of course, never had any motivation to push the advancement of Java -
quite the opposite.
So the reason cannot be the lawsuit, which is at best a
convenient excuse for M$ at this point (but not for NS).
Also, Sun _wants_ IE to incorporate the latest Java, as
their new lawsuit against M$ clearly indicates.
Of course Sun wants IE to incorporate the latest Java - their vision of
Java as the platform never materialised in any form that brought them
the application control they'd hoped for. The dominant platform remains
Windows, and to be locked out of that platform (or more accurately, to
be effectively locked out of that for the case of 75% of consumers) is
disastrous for the further dissemination of Java as a standardised
platform that is hosted on other, disparate platforms.
debian ships with NS 4,x in contrib. How difficult would
it be be for the woody Netscape package to ship with
1.4 Java Plug-in pre-installed?
As this list has discussed, there are plenty of problems with
(re-)distributing Sun's JREs.
Damian
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