Java: from gray to orange

Maybe some developers of Sun are hidden Dutch soccer fans. Just in time for the soccer match tomorrow they announced an overhaul of the Java applet loading animation. "Loading animation" you may wonder? Actually the current animation is added since Java 5 and is only shown when loading an applet:

To make a better fit in corporate branding, Sun decided to change this, and changed the animation to a very Dutch-orange box:

See the blog for full details here, including the animation that is WebStart enabled if you installed Java 6. I think the new animation looks a lot better, though maybe a bit heavy on the color use. The animation will be the default for Java 6 update 1 and Java 7. Personally though, I hope that the promised startup improvements in Java 7 will make it possible to just remove the start-up animation! Sun can still put this nice animation in some about box then. 😉