For what it's worth, I agree with much of what you wrote there. JS performance has come on dramatically in the recent past, and combined with new HTML and CSS tools, you would be much better off starting a new project today using HTML+CSS+JS in most cases.

However, it's not the demands of new software that bothers me in this situation. It's the gazillions of developer-years' worth of existing, working, "legacy" software that is getting broken. We can't have everyone rewriting their entire software portfolio every six weeks because someone at Mozilla or Google decided they don't like the current reality. Put bluntly, neither Mozilla nor Google is that important, as I suspect the former is about to realise rather painfully.

...wrote mx+b for free, before sharing it via a web forum operated by a commercial organisation and funded by ads.

I have never had any problems getting applets to run across all the major browsers, until the recent rounds of deliberate breakage from various browser vendors and Oracle.

Similarly, I have had applets deployed in the field that kept running quite happily for years. I have current ones from the Java 5 days that worked fine well into the Java 7 era, and nothing was breaking during the updates, again until the past few months when APIs that were stable for nearly 20 years got changed and other similar silliness.

Depending on who you ask, there are about 2.5B people using the Internet now. If we assume most of them use the Web and we assume that the pattern for Chrome is representative of the general population, that means more than 200,000,000 people used a Java applet at some point in the previous month.

Even I am surprised by that, but in any case, it seems you and I have very different ideas of what "almost extinction-level rare" means.

The number of support e-mails in my inbox this week from those users suggests that they aren't too happy about being "defended" in this way.

You do understand that without those Bad Things you so hate, there probably wouldn't be a Web worth saving, right? Someone has to pay the bills, and if you're not going to pay for content, you're not going to accept advertising, you want full privacy and security when using services you're not paying anything for... Who is going to write the cheque?

I hate DRM and spammy ads and privacy invasions as much as anyone -- more that most, probably, given that I really do give up on some things most people accept because I refuse to support the intrusions. But still, we live in the real world, and you can't just wish Bad Things away without proposing Better Alternatives. BTW, "everything I want should be free and unencumbered" is not a viable Better Alternative.

Hi 2013, this is 1995 calling. When your new shiny toys have the portability and performance and flexibility that we had nearly two decades ago, and developers can write software using them with a reasonable expectation that it will still be working in 5 or 10 years (or even 1 or 2 years) without needing constant maintenance, then you get a vote. Until then, we'll keep our "stupid" ideas, because they've been helping us get useful work done since before you were born. Kthxbye.

No, warning people before loading an insecure plugin that it is insecure is great. Warning people that a newly updated plugin with no known vulnerabilities is insecure confuses them and teaches them that your security messages are worthless and they should just click yes.

I don't think anyone is claiming that Java is some paragon of Internet virtue that should be trusted without question, or that blocking plugins from unknown sites until the user OKs them is necessarily a bad idea. However, crying wolf and creating obscure UIs and turning everyday software into nuisanceware isn't a good response.

Must we have this troll comment every time someone mentions Java applets?

Java applets are commonly used, as they have been for many years. According to this Chromium blog post from September 2013, 8.9% of Chrome users had launched something using the Java plugin in the past month.

Among the common uses that get mentioned every time this discussion comes up are: public access to banking and government systems in various countries, games, user interfaces for devices (scientific equipment, network infrastructure, all kinds of examples), access to local hardware devices that aren't yet available via newer technologies, some popular teleconferencing and VPN software, and little demo graphics written by academics to go on their web sites a decade ago that are still just as relevant today.

In other words, just because you don't use Java applets yourself or know when they're still useful, don't assume everyone else is in the same situation.

You can oversimplify a situation to make the evidence mean whatever you want. A guitarist will talk about "muscle memory" and how their hands just do what they need to do. That doesn't mean they lack free will when playing a guitar solo. Our brains are complex, and behaviours become instinctive and responsive over time in order to react quickly; free will can then override the instinctive decision. For example, when driving your car you might find yourself braking because you've seen something out of the corner of your eye, you then decide that the car in the side road isn't about to pull out on you, so you make a conscious decision to put your foot on the gas. It doesn't mean you lack free will, it means you've trained your instincts to respond before higher reasoning kicks in, but your higher reasoning can still override that response - and it was your decision to train yourself that gave you the instinct in the first place.

I think you mean intuition.

I've also heard that their new lines are better, but by definition they don't have a long track record yet to know whether they'll stay that way.

In any case, there are other brands with much more consistent technical track records and much better customer service who also have well-reviewed recent products available.

This is the trouble with cutting corners and mistreating customers and damaging your business reputation as a result: it's a trap that your business will probably never escape, no matter what you do later. Your brand becomes toxic, and as you can see from this thread, no-one's going to shed many tears when your business eventually fails.

Sure, it's a YMMV issue. The trouble is, the people who don't know enough to pick a "safe" default setup as you're suggesting are exactly the ones who most need one.

Linux command prompts make me nervous, and I'm a professional who's been using them for years. Thankfully, I haven't (yet!) really screwed up and lost a lot of stuff, but I know similarly experienced and generally competent people who have. Sometimes all it takes is running a command without a key parameter, and that's as easy as catching the enter key at the wrong time or running a script that doesn't check how many arguments it was given before it starts substituting placeholders.

Not that I disagree with your real point about using a Linux live CD, but please be careful telling people to play around with it because it won't harm anything. Your normal Windows drives probably get mounted by default, and one mistaken command with a cryptic two-letter name could easily destroy data without even prompting for confirmation (rm, dd, etc.).

My own experience with OCZ drives is a 100% failure rate and no support to speak of.

Far more significantly, though, my supplier's experience with them was that they saw such a high proportion of returns that they dropped the brand entirely. My anecdotal data point might have been down to bad luck, but the odds of the pattern my supplier told me about being down to luck would be tiny.