Did any of that money go to Mozilla or any other organization seeking to advance and secure the internet for the vast majority of people who did not waste money on overpriced products from a company that doesn't want to take responsibility for its poor judgement and inflexibility?
Please take your obvious trolling somewhere else. Not all software that runs in web browsers was written in the last year or two, after HTML5 and CSS3 and all the related new technologies became viable options for doing heavily interactive graphics on web sites. For many years before that, tools like Flash and Java applets were the only games in town, and a lot of production software with many years of development behind it that is still widely useful was built using those tools.
We are supporting our users. The point is that in this case we shouldn't have to. The problem is an entirely artificial one of Mozilla's creation, and no support from anyone should ever have been necessary.
The problem is entirely of Oracle's and your own creation. Oracle is not adequately supporting their software, and you have failed to notice the signs over the past several years that browsers were headed in exactly this direction and adapt accordingly.
Mozilla is taking the only responsible course to protect the vast majority of their users. It's been a long time coming, and absolutely no one should be surprised that it finally arrived. If anything, I'm surprised it took this for the first major browser to do it.
An unfortunate comment, because some of the devices I had in mind when writing those last few posts are in fact medical equipment.
If Java-based UIs are no longer readily available to clinical staff the way they were last week, then effectively their instruments just got broken. Delays and increased suffering for patients are all but certain consequences until the IT staff have chance to fix things again.
Fortunately, the software running on equipment that could actually cause death as a direct result of failure is written to much higher standards and shouldn't depend on this kind of technology in the first place.
> Delays and increased suffering for patients are all but certain consequences
If the product you are building is not future proof it is your problem not Mozilla's.
Dont blame Mozilla for your poor technology choices. Applets will eventually stop working, and you'll be responsible if your product fails , not Mozilla.
Dont blame anybody else but you. You broke the medical staff instruments by choosing or maintaining a dead technology thus putting patient lives in danger. Do you think they'll sue you ? or Mozilla if there is an accident? You are responsible.
If the product you are building is not future proof it is your problem not Mozilla's.
Nothing is future-proof if the people controlling the platforms move the goalposts. We have standards and value backward compatibility for a reason: it's because violating those standards and breaking that compatibility hurts. And it's going to become Mozilla's problem if they continue down this path, because Firefox will cease to be a viable browser choice for a significant proportion of their potential market.
Dont blame Mozilla for your poor technology choices. Applets will eventually stop working
I don't know why you're writing as if I personally broke these medical devices. I've never personally worked on any of those projects, I'm just familiar with them and citing them as examples of why this sort of change is damaging.
In any case, people really should get off the "Java applets is a dead technology" bandwagon. Viable replacements using HTML/CSS/JS are very recent developments, and people have been developing web-based user interfaces for all kinds of devices for decades. Of course they're not all going to throw out all that work and rewrite everything from scratch. There's nothing wrong with it, and contrary to your claim, there is no reason those applets must eventually stop working. They'll work just fine as long as browsers run Java applets, which they've been doing just fine for many years.
Obviously applets will stop working if browser makers deliberately drop support for them even though it's been available for a very long time. However, that's like saying obviously CSS3 is no use for anything because it's not all W3C standardised in stone yet so you're stupid if you use it today because it might all be different at some arbitrary point in the future that no-one can predict. You can shoot down any technology, no matter how modern and trendy, with such a generic argument, but it doesn't demonstrate anything particularly helpful to do so.
You broke the medical staff instruments by choosing or maintaining a dead technology thus putting patient lives in danger.
No, I didn't, but if the serious software I work on were medical in nature, you could literally bet your life that I wouldn't be letting either Java or Firefox anywhere near it and would be using an entirely different level of engineering practice to build it, as I do for certain projects in other fields where reliability is essential.
However, while we build the literally life-or-death systems that way, chances are the word processor, KVM, and, yes, web browser that organisations doing vital work use for day-to-day activities are not developed to the same standards. Breaking them still hurts, if only in efficiency (which can obviously still be harmful in a medical context). Unless you're claiming that all software that runs in any medical facility must be developed to the same standards as control software for high-risk, safety-critical systems, again, your argument is so generic that it doesn't really prove anything interesting.
TLDR it's your problem , not Mozilla's. You can still tell your clients to uee another browser, heck they had to install java on their machines for your solution to work... they should not had too, but smart people always make poor technology choices.
You can still tell your clients to uee another browser
Actually, we've been doing that for quite some time on one of the major projects I work on that uses Java applets, for exactly this reason. We usually recommend a recent version of IE, and as a general policy we don't offer any sort of guaranteed support for Firefox or Chrome. Of course we still test on those other browsers routinely and we'll help customers who have problems if we can, but no-one is getting any money back if they break later because of the kinds of changes we're talking about.
The worrying thing for Mozilla should be how many businesses are essentially telling us that they agree and they're moving or already planning to move back to IE as their corporate standard. It's certainly not always because of Java, but choices like rapid update cycles, lack of long-term support, and willingness to drop useful functionality do seem to be generating an increasing amount of hostility from institutional users.
The sorry state of medical IT and medical device vendors is not Mozilla's fault. It is especially not Mozilla's fault if medical organizations and their vendors are rolling out updates they haven't tested themselves.
You're probably aware that in many, if not almost all commercial EULAs, you'll find an all-caps passage like this one I just pulled out of Apple's OS X license document:
> E. YOU FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THE APPLE SOFTWARE AND SERVICES ARE NOT INTENDED OR SUITABLE FOR USE IN SITUATIONS OR ENVIRONMENTS WHERE THE FAILURE OR TIME DELAYS OF, OR ERRORS OR INACCURACIES IN THE CONTENT, DATA OR INFORMATION PROVIDED BY, THE APPLE SOFTWARE OR SERVICES COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, LIFE SUPPORT OR WEAPONS SYSTEMS.
It's stated clearly and at length because absolutely no one writing general-purpose software wants to bear this responsibility. FOSS no less than commercial, but FOSS is generally a less-attractive lawsuit target.
Trying to foist this responsibility onto Mozilla is just evil. They didn't ask for it. They didn't offer their software as a solution to medical IT's woes. But you want to blame them for obvious misuse of their software causing harm to patients.
If I were to die of an aneurysm tomorrow, would it be your fault for not being a competent neurosurgeon and healing me? No. Nor should it be Mozilla's fault that it does not produce a medical device, but a piece of software someone has decided to misuse as one.
> If Java-based UIs are no longer readily available to clinical staff the way they were last week, then effectively their instruments just got broken.
Would that be a failure of Firefox (or other browser vendors) or a failure of hospital IT staff to manage the medical devices / desktops / network effectively?
That's a fair question. However, I don't think some people posting in this discussion would like the equally fair answer.
Logically, if Firefox is not going to support long term stability and compatibility -- and clearly it doesn't in the case we're discussing -- then the only possible conclusion is that Firefox can't be part of an effectively managed IT infrastructure for these kinds of organisations. That means the correct course of action for those responsible for that infrastructure is to plan to remove any dependencies on Firefox as quickly as possible and to replace it with something more stable, which presumably means IE in this context.
Yes, Mozilla has been pretty clear on this. If you want more stability, you need the ESR release, and if that's not enough, you're out of luck. Mainline Firefox is simply not intended for use within organizations that demand the kind of stability you want.
You need to evaluate the ESR release, and/or find a different browser entirely. IE may indeed be the best option if you only support Windows clients. Though Microsoft hasn't exactly been shy about forcing IE along more quickly of late, either.
Mainline Firefox is simply not intended for use within organizations that demand the kind of stability you want.
I'm not sure who mainline Firefox is intended for any more. That's part of the problem, I think.
It seems like Mozilla are chasing Google to the exclusion of almost anything else, and the main goal for both of them seems to be ticking boxes to say they have more bleeding edge features, even though hardly any real projects can actually use most of those features because they aren't stable and portable enough yet. Meanwhile, users get interfaces that subtly shift around every few days, developers are fighting a constant battle just to stand still, and as we've been discussing, organisations can't manage large-scale deployments robustly at all any more.
Your mistake is in conflating Java with the browser. The two are unrelated. Neither is really built with the other in mind, their development is not integrated or synchronized in any way, and the paradigms are just generally incompatible. And now, one poses a clear and present danger to the security of the other.
If you had a Java application, you would not have a problem. If you had a web application, you would not have a problem. If you had a C or C++ application built against either native Windows APIs or a mature cross-platform toolkit, you would not have a problem.
Instead, you rely on browsers continuing to put their users at risk by automatically running code in a constantly-leaking sandbox managed by a company that doesn't give a shit.
Understand this: Java is a hole in the defenses of modern web browsers. It is behind. Way behind. And it will remain so forever. It and its owner are not up to the task of dealing with the modern web.
So yes, you're going to be fighting a constant battle so long as you insist on relying on what everybody already knew was crap in the mid-90s.
Or you could just tell your users to click the magic button.
I really hope you aren't one of the same people who say IE6 and IE7 have to die, and so web developers are right to try to force their users to use modern browsers.
I work with the NHS in the UK; quite a few of the medical professionals are forced to use IE6 or IE7 because the hospital IT staff are managing their medical devices / desktops / network effectively, just as you say.
When Firefox makes a decision like this, what they apparently did not seem to consider is that they are drawing a cutoff line which has serious costs to some of their users. I didn't see any discussion of this whatsoever in the issue thread.
Imagine a relatively forward-thinking hospital that has been able to allow their staff to use fairly-recent versions of Firefox (once new versions have been vetted by IT). Changes like this may force them to stop deploying new versions completely, until some time possibly a decade from now when they're finally able to replace the Java-based UI.
My immediate point was that it's not as if Firefox is all of the sudden automatically updating itself on the hospital computers and people start dying because Java applets won't run. If that happened, I would blame the IT staff for allowing such a critical component to update itself without any sort of evaluation.
