JVM 5 is the new IE6

The OP is actually quite lucky. I still have to support 1.4 installs.<p>But what's the worst: If you tell these IT departments to maybe update, they tell you that updating would pose a security risk which is ridiculous when you consider what's out there and actively targeting all JVMs younger than 1.6u27

More appropriate would have been to say that JVM 5 is the new MSVC6.<p>MSVC6 is the compiler that killed C++. It did not support many features from the C++98 standard. Many projects were written for MSVC6 or earlier and did not start using new language features to keep MSVC6 compatibility.

I think the analogy is a little misleading, considering that the IE family is "choose one" but the JVM permits independent installations (most JVM products have gone so far as to just ship with the JRE bundled with their product).

No it's not.<p>At least it is not anymore officially supported by Sun/Oracle, and it hasn't been for quite some time.<p>The problem with IE6 is that it was the latest MS browser for too many years.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that current dynamic JVM implementations had relatively similar performance to newer JVM versions, so for some that use the JVM for specialized parts of the application i.e. app engine, than wouldn't some of the changes be insignificant from a performance standpoint?

It has full backward compatibility, but does it work?

as is XP, etc.<p>"...is the new IE6." is the new "...is the new black."