A few months ago, Apple decided not to support Flash on iOS devices and now it looks like Apple is now ready to do same thing with Java in Mac OS X. Yesterday, Apple released Java updates for Mac OS X and those who have checked out Apple’s developer documentation have noticed that the company is thinking of ceasing future distributions of its custom-ported Java packages.
As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the version of Java that is ported by Apple, and that ships with Mac OS X, is deprecated.
This means that the Apple-produced runtime will not be maintained at the same level, and may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X. The Java runtime shipping in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will continue to be supported and maintained through the standard support cycles of those products.
Apart from this, Apple’s new Mac App Store Guidelines also warns its users not to use deprecated or optionally installed technologies which means apps using Java would not get App Store approval. Still, developers can distributes their apps with other means but this move by Apple shows that they’re looking to de-emphasize certain third-party technologies in their products.
Apple has been criticized for slowly releasing Java updates for Mac OS X so it is possible that Oracle may start to release their own Java packages for just it like they do for Windows and Linux. Java, along with Flash, has been known as runtimes with the biggest security flaws and it is recommended to avoid them if you can, for complete security of your computer.
Another reason for this move could be security issues that are starting to appear with Java applications. Recently, Microsoft had mentioned that Java applications were the most attacked software packages and they have surpassed Adobe’s applications in these numbers.
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