Java Applets in Firefox
I've spent a bunch of the day messing around with Java applets and jars and Firefox trying to get a page to work. Needless to say, I'm less than thrilled with Sun's Applet support in Firefox... or maybe it's Firefox's support of the Java Applet VM. Either way, it's a load of crud and needs to be worked on pretty seriously.
First, why on earth has Sun not yet made a 64-bit applet plugin for Firefox and other 64-bit operating systems. Even their own 64-bit Solaris doesn't have one. I've looked at the bug tracking for Sun's Java and there are requests as far back as 1.3.x-days for a 64-bit applet plugin. But nothing yet in 1.6 - you've got to wonder what their own developers are using - 32-bit Windows is the answer. Amazingly short-sighted. Thankfully, Leopard will be 64-bit and have a 64-bit Java applet plug-in for Safari, and I'm assuming Firefox. I am amazed to think it's going to be a Mac to bring this to a usable platform. Certainly puts Windows and Sun to shame.
Next, there is a limitation on the linux Java plug-in with regards to the line length of an applet PARAM tag. Don't know what the actual length is, but when I sent in the bug (with an example) to the Firefox bugzilla site, the guy that picked it up said that the problem was in the Java plug-in and that's all the further it got. On windows there's no such limitation, but I do a lot of my developing on linux (64-bit at that) and it'd be nice to be able to have the same page render on linux and windows the same.
So I'm trying to figure out why this page is bringing Firefox to a crawl and not IE. I'm now convinced that the interface to the Java plug-in in IE is significantly different than the one in Firefox, and the IE one is doing something to compensate for any limitations in the plugin. One such difference is that in IE there appears to be a static picture taken of the applet and then it's stopped. This makes for applets that simply display information (like graphs) quicker to load and less of a CPU hog. Since I can't get the Firefox team to look into it, I'll have to simply hope that the next release will implement the plugin interface better and some of these things will just work themselves out. I sure hope so.