From an user's perspective, it may not change much, but for developers it's another thing. Apple did not bundle Sun's JVM with OS X, they developed its own version, just like Microsoft did, and would continue to do if they didn't ruin the whole thing. What's more, at one point Apple officially supported Java as a language suitable for developing OS X applications. Not anymore. Developers using Java now have to wait for Oracle to come up with a version of its own, which may or not suck more than Apple's own.

With Apple's security track record, non-bundling Flash and Java doesn't automatically make them invulnerable, they only have potentially fewer holes, but not many. And I say "potentially", because Flash had been autoupdating itself for a while and the JVM is updated via Apple Software Update, so in one case the infection window lasts at most a whole week, and in the second case, it's a matter of Apple to change its policies.

And finally, did you know the review guidelines for Apple's new App Store reject (among others) Java apps?

Who knows, in the end, it may not mean much, after all Microsoft used to bundle both Flash and their own JVM, and Windows hasn't become a less open platform that it was before, but Apple's control tendencies cannot be understated in things like this. In principle it's a good thing for Mac users that developers make good use of OS X features when developing applications, but in the long term you may be precluding them from using 3rd party tools which would make things easier for them, and we already saw a glimpse of such future with the abandoned iPhone app guidelines.

Yeah, except that Opera is probably too late to hop onto the bandwagon - FireFox probably has the majority of the devs, and unless Opera have been pretty clever about their implementation, there's probably too much effort involved in supporting both browsers for a plugin writer (disclaimer: I haven't looked at either browser's plugin/extension implementation, all I know is firefox uses javascript/XUL).

-f0dder (October 22, 2010, 01:07 PM)

Opera's approach to extensions is similar to the one used by Chrome, so it's unlikely a Firefox extension developer will support both approaches, although that may vary based on such extension reliance on XUL.