Java Applet z-index problem; Safari and beyond

Question

A well known problem with Java Applets in webpages is that browsers ignore the z-index of the applet tag vs. other components in the page. No matter how you position and z-index elements in the page, applets will draw themselves on top of everything.

There is a workaround, known as the iframe shim, is described here: http://www.oratransplant.nl/2007/10/26/using-iframe-shim-to-partly-cover-a-java-applet/.

However, this workaround does not work in Safari 3 or 4 in Windows (assuming the same for Mac).

Does anyone know a way to make it work in Safari?

Does anyone have ideas about how to pressure Sun to fix the underlying problem so we can avoid clumsy shims? Here is a bug report on the issue, http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6646289, notice that it has been open for a year, however other bug reports go back many many years.

This is so frustrating, don't Sun understand that this is the very sort of thing that has marginalized Java as a way of doing cool stuff in the browser? I love you Java, but you are not helping your situation...

Answer 1

For one, Java on Mac is actually built by Apple and not Sun. As for the applets, we hide the applets when there is something appearing on top of it. That might not suffice for your needs though.

Answer 2

Actually problem is not related to z-index at all. It's caused by "windowed" drawing model of Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI).

You can't do anything about it (except the shim). Plugin author has to rewrite it using windowless API.