Moving to a Plugin-Free Web

By late 2015, many browser vendors have either removed or
announced timelines
for the removal of standards based plugin support, eliminating the ability to
embed Flash, Silverlight, Java and other plugin based technologies.


With modern browser vendors working to restrict and reduce plugin support in
their products, developers of applications that rely on the Java browser plugin
need to consider alternative options such as migrating from Java Applets (which rely on a
browser plugin) to the plugin-free Java Web
Start technology.

Oracle plans to deprecate the Java browser plugin in JDK 9.
This technology will be removed from the Oracle JDK and JRE in a future Java SE
release.


Early Access releases of JDK 9 are available for download and testing at http://jdk9.java.net. More background and information
about different migration options can be found in this short whitepaper from
Oracle.

Update:  Technical information about the planned deprecation step in JDK 9 can be found in JEP 289 .