HotJava

» see java.sun.com/products/hotjava as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i missed HotJava by about three years and a continent. the browser sitting on the machine i first went online with in 1998 was Internet Explorer, and the one i went and fetched for myself was Netscape. Sun's own browser was by then a curiosity rather than anything you loaded on purpose. java itself i came to know well enough. the browser it was invented to advertise i never ran once.

it started in 1994 as WebRunner, written by the Oak team at Sun as a clone of Mosaic, the name lifted off Blade Runner. the point was never to take the browser market. the point was that the language they had built for set-top boxes needed something to be visibly good at, and a browser that could download a small program and run it safely inside a page was the most convincing demonstration anyone could come up with. John Gage and James Gosling showed it at the TED conference in Monterey in 1995, and Sun announced it under the HotJava name that may, on the same day it announced Java.

for a while it genuinely was the only one. a page could carry a program, the browser would fetch it and run it in a sandbox, and the page could then move and talk back to a server without reloading itself. that is most of the promise of the modern web arriving in 1995, inside a browser almost nobody had. the release that could actually be called finished, version 1.0, did not ship until march 1997, and by then the argument had already been won somewhere else.

~ the case file ~

~ the demo that worked too well ~

on the day Sun announced Java, Netscape said it would license the thing. applet support turned up in Netscape's next major browser, which meant the feature HotJava existed to show off was now available inside the browser that most of the web already ran. Sun had wanted the world to write Java. it got that. what it did not get, and did not really need, was anyone using its browser to do it, and a product whose only job is to prove a point tends to end the moment the point is conceded.

~ why it lost ~

the honest technical answer is that it was slow. a browser written entirely in Java ran on the Java virtual machines of the mid 90s, which were heavy on memory and unhurried about everything, so rendering a page felt like work the machine was reluctant to do. the feature list was thin next to what Netscape and Microsoft were shipping at each other every few months. version 3.0 came out in late 2004 and nothing followed it. Sun's own download center was decommissioned on 31 july 2011, which is when the last official copy quietly went off the internet.

what survived is smaller and stranger than the browser. the HTML parser written for HotJava was reused in the standard Java libraries and has been sitting there ever since, doing service inside enterprise software that has no idea it is running a piece of a dead browser from 1995. that is the closest thing HotJava has to a monument. not a product, a class file.

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