A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Sun's plan to release a Consumer JRE. Since beginning of October, an early access version of that JRE called "Java SE 6 Update N" is out. Unfortunately, I'm a little late on this, cause I didn't have internet access for a week. There has been so much coverage on this topic, that I won't bother your with any details and jump right to my impressions.
I mainly focused on testing the startup improvements. Sun calls the feature Java Quick Start. I followed Sun's instructions and I'm totally blown away by the results. Usually, when I hit a website with an applet for the first time, my browser hangs quite a bit, until Java is fired up and the applet is loaded. Of course it depends: a simple news ticker is loaded faster than a full-blown application. However, the delay is very frustrating and with Java Quick Start this pain is gone! I didn't conduct a thorough analyzes, but you can really feel the difference! I tested it with a couple of applets. If you have a fast machine, you probably won't experience any improvements, but if you have an average machine like mine, then the difference is remarkable!
There is almost no drawback, in terms of memory. After enabling Java Quick Start, my memory available dropped about 5MB and the process itself only needs about 2MB. I guess the numbers depend on your configuration, but for me there's no drawback in respect of memory.
In the comments of my last posting, Dominik mentioned the memory increase, once the Java browser plug-in was loaded. I guess that will addressed with the next feature called "Kernel installation mode". I'm really excited to see this feature coming, because then applets will finally be on par with flash.
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