Bug 157926 – Remove applet support

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: DUPLICATE
• Component: DOM

[Domenic Denicola]

Per discussions in https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/454 we're trying to see if other browsers are willing to follow Chrome's lead and remove support for <applet>. So far it seems like Edge is in favor as well.

Concretely:

- Do *not* change the parsing rules for <applet>
- Remove HTMLAppletElement
- Make document.applets always return an empty HTMLCollection (even if there are <applet> elements in the document).

Would WebKit be interested in this change?

As a bonus, you'd get to close a *bunch* of open issues: https://bugs.webkit.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=applet&list_id=1805197

[Domenic Denicola]

After doing further spec survey, I added these additional changes:

- Remove applet from document.all
- Remove applet from the Document's named properties collection
- Remove applet from the Window's named properties collection
- Remove applet attributes align="", hspace="", vspace="", width="", and height="" presentional behavior

[Chris Dumez]

Does anyone have any opinion on this?

[Sam Weinig]

I'd want data on how much it is used in Safari before making a call. In the past, there have been some big users of Java in Safari on the Mac, so it's not an obvious call to me.

[Ryosuke Niwa]

I just checked the internal statistics, and Java is still used in a significant proportion of users so I don't think we're dropping this feature anytime soon given Safari is probably the only browser on Mac that supports Java at this point.

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Just a status update here:

 * Gecko removal: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1279218 (shipped in FF56)
 * Spec removal: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/1399
 * Chromium removal: https://crbug.com/470301 (shipped a ton ago)
 * Edge bug (not sure if they have removed or not): https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/issues/11946645/

I'm happy to write a patch for this if WebKit's position on this removal changes.

[Ryosuke Niwa]

There is no consensus to remove this feature from WebKit at this moment.

[Sam Sneddon [:gsnedders]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 218677 ***