The status of Java on my machine:

Java is *not* prone to memory leaks. You have to actually make quite an effort to leak memory in a Java application. Of course, making those kind of mistakes is one of the first things n00bs seem to learn.

JavaScript is entirely different from Java. "No relation" as they say.

You can leave JS enabled... if you try turning it off, you'll see damn near ever website break to some degree.

Likewise: I have the JRE enabled, but the browser plugin disabled. The browser plugin seems to be the real security issue.

I suspect the GP is being fairly loose with the term "memory leak" using it to mean applications whose memory usage goes up over time even though what the user is doing with the app isn't changing much.

One problem is people think a garbage collector stops them having to worry about memory. That is true to an extent but programmers still have to be careful to avoid situations where an object is highly unlikely to be (or possiblly even can't be) used again but nevertheless there is a reference sitting arround to it somewhere.

Another is that use of background garbage collection can create very undesirable behaviour under a multitasking OS and especially under a multitasking OS with swap and from the outside this behaviour looks very much like a "leak". AIUI If something stops the (low priority) gc thread from running then the application will continue to eat up memory until it hits a hard limit on the memory available (at which point non-background gc will be forced). Meanwhile the OS has no idea that the app doesn't really need this memory and so will do whatever is needed to make it available. Afaict this misbehaviour is why java runs with a relatively low hard memory limit by default (which papers over the problem to some extent but is far from an ideal soloution).