Java Plug In 5

Java plug in 5.0 (it's 5 even though the java console may say 1.5) has a few nifty features. One is that it displays an animation while an applet is being loaded. This is not particularly usefull for me because our applet's load up very fast indeed (for example Rad FTP is just 70k).

This new feature is probably very usefull for those companies who write applets that take an eternity to load but does nothing more than produce a simple ticker tape that slows your browser to a crawl. Still it's nice feature. Interestingly the display of this animation also seems to gobble up considerable amounts of CPU.

Just below the shining sun, you see a small progress bar that show which percentage of the applet has loaded, again this is probably usefull for authors of those 500Kb snowflake or shimmering lake applets but it's not very usefull for our Business card designer which is less than 128Kb. still...

Interestingly enough about two years ago, I once worked on a windows machine that produced a progress bar while an applet was being loaded. At the time I took no interest and didn't bother to find out what the plug in was. I have not seen it happen on any other machine and I guess it may have been the microsoft version of the plug in.

So does that mean I have something positive to say about M$ for a change? yes two things. The first is that I have sadly noticed that java apps seem to run a wee bit faster on windows. I have not yet seen J2SE 5.0 running on windows but on linux it seems to be much faster than the older.4x versions. Let's hope that the linux JVMs may have finally caught up.

And the second positive thing? well you cannot drag and drop files from either the KDE or Gnome file managers into Rad Upload but can do so from explorer. That does not mean you cannot use Rad Upload from mozilla on linux - you can but only with copy paste.