Please know the difference between bad/customer unfriendly handling of installers/updaters, and actually bad software.
While Java admittedly has a solid underlying core, the criticism is for the entire platform, which has some significant problems, some technical, some security, and many organizational.
That said, I'm not sure what technical problems you're referring to. The JVM seems to work quite well on all platforms, even if it can be kinda clunky to program in Java at times. (which is part of the reason I mentioned other languages) And yes, I know the JVM is slow to start. It isn't designed for small scripts. Use Python or something else for that.
If regular users were commonly aware of what browser plugins they actually need, and knew how to go through the list and disable the ones they actually didn't need, that would mitigate things somewhat.
That's the problem - the 'bad' installer/update makes good software into 'bad' software
On my Windows gaming box I get a dialog box that says jusched.exe : cannot verify certificate of somesubdomain.oracle.com. I don't know if I'm more or less at risk if I press "no", but I guess the average user is just going to press "yes". So I guess my Java is now out of date but I'm not going to install software with admin privileges if there's a problem in validating certificates.
I will never ever install Java on a Windows box again. I did install it because I wanted to play a game written in Java. The game was unplayable because it was so slow and jerky - because it was written in Java.
There may be bits and pieces of cool tech inside, but for the vast majority of computer users, Java is crapware.
Both Sun and Oracle fucked up on the naming.
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.
The folks I was replying to seemed to think that adobe stopping them was anti free market. I just wanted to clarify that that meant they didn't agree with copyright in any form, which is quite an extreme position.
Adobe gets to decide on the distribution method, whether with or without Ninite. There's nothing stopping Adobe from bundling McAfee with Flash in such a way that it becomes impossible to install Flash without McAfee, it's a free market after all. Instead Adobe gave users a choice as to whether or not to install McAfee, and Ninite helps users express that choice.
> they didn't agree with copyright in any form
The article doesn't say anything about copyright or DMCA. Nobody else has expressed any view on copyright in this thread. The only person in this thread who is talking about copyright is you.
--edit-- And it could still be a copyright violation if the terms of the license require non-automated install. As it's adobe's product they get to say how it is copied (installed).
If you are not paying attention - which most people don't - you'll be installing unwanted software, because so much relies on basically crappy software (Flash and Java). Actually, that makes them crappy is their ubiquitousness. Even if you seldom use Flash or Java applets, you'll often find yourself having them installed, because there is that one site that needs one or the other.
Now, people like us with the technical knowhow know how to get around that (disable plugins; flashblock, etc.), but most people just install these things whenever there are updates, each is a change of getting crapware along with them. And Java is quite often updated.