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Because it gives the Java programmer too much power in an environment that should be safe. For example there are applets like AppEmbed that can run an EXE in the browser. That's just insane. Flash and Shockwave in contrast are limited in that sense, you are constrained to doing what you are able to accomplish with ActionScript or Lingo (or at least, that is intended to be the case.) Flash is insecure because it's buggy, Java is insecure because it's buggy AND because it's intended to work in ways you'd think are obviously insecure!

discuss

dnomad|7 years ago

Applets, unless especially privileged by the user, run in a sandbox that prevent them from interacting with the local OS [1]. They certainly cannot run EXEs, again, unless the user consents.

In theory the Applet sandbox works really well. It's an extremely secure environment that's been deployed widely in the most demanding conditions -- think banks and governments. In practice the Applet security model encountered the following problems:

(1) Users are really, really dumb. They are happy to grant escalated privileges to the some 3D farming game they stumbled upon on the internet. Users will literally click on anything you tell them to. [2]

(2) Getting users to upgrade Java was terribly difficult. This meant when a real security flaw was discovered it might hang around for years and years and years. There was no mechanism to force users to upgrade Java or to actively disable Java installations proven insecure.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/se...

[2] https://www.trustedsec.com/2013/04/java-7-update-21-applet-s...

pharrington|7 years ago

Maybe I'm confused because it's only relatively recently that I started again to take Java seriously, but isn't that precisely an example of a domain the Java security manager addresses? Again, I am well aware of the implementation bugs that have existed, and I don't know offhand if the security manager was part of Java's initial design or was added later, but I'm still confused as to why your ire's directed at the general concept of Java in the browser, rather than the specifically flawed implementations.

jplayer01|7 years ago

There's just no safe way to do what Java applets enabled (arbitrary code execution), because of the massive attack surface. It's one reason why NPAPI is dead.