4 years after, I still don't understand!

Why does everyone hate Java so much?

To me it seems like it's got it's strengths and weakness like any other language.

I'm aware of it's weakness but I don't think that the amount of hatred upon the whole language is justified.

>>6
Execution speed is only a small part of the picture, specially for commodity software which generally isn't computation-heavy. The time the actual program takes to run is noise.

Hint: Gecko has always been quite a bit faster than WebKit, but see Firefox and Chrome. Who cares how fast it draws the page if you just had to wait 5 seconds until it started up.