No, you don’t need the JRE for Javascript. All modern browsers support Javascript out of the box. They have since the Netscape days. It’s only called Javascript for marketing reasons, not because it’s actually related to Java. To quote Wikipedia:
I don’t know which book you read, but my experience is that many of them are poorly written. You don’t need an SDK for JavaScript (a text editor will do), though using one could certainly make the task easier. Maybe the book just wanted you to download JRE for the Eclipse IDE.
Java is platform independent, yes, but its implementation is inelegant in a very 90s way. For most modern web apps calling for platform-independence, AJAX is the norm (Javascript + real-time data transfer). This is what Google, Facebook, etc. use. More graphics-intensive things use Flash. And some classic websites (Craigslist and Wikipedia, for example) never bothered to make the jump and are stuck in the old fill-out-data-click-submit-wait-for-server-to-process-and-send-you-a-whole-new-page paradigm. None of them use Java on the user side (they may for stuff on the servers, hard to say).
Java is still used for a lot of things that computer geeks and scientists care about, but not typically for consumer web content anymore.
Maybe so. I haven’t researched this enough so I won’t comment.
Coming in a bit late to this thread, but does anybody run the System File Checker anymore? I run it by force of habit, but I have no idea if it actually fixes anything or not.
It 's probably part of Avast that didn’t get removed. Did you use Revo to uninstall it? In Control Panel, Administrative Tools, run Services. Do you see any names that start with “ash…”?
If that doesn’t work, in Services, stop Windows Management Instrumentation
Go to C:\Windows\system32\WBEM and delete the Repository folder
Restart Windows Management Instrumentation
Restart the computer
I’ll have to try the Avast removal later. Another lingering problem is slow WiFi. Videos load slowly and the connection is unstable at times. My other laptop does not have this problem working off the same modem and router.
I should mention the problematic laptop sits under my desk, right by the modem, and the router is on top of my desk. The laptop is about 3 feet from the router. I use the problematic laptop as a desktop, with an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard.