Minecraft – How to get rid of the old Minecraft launcher

They have to wait for all of the mods that they include in the pack to be updated.

Some mods, like Forge, use the prerelease to update -- but some don't. For some mods, the authors just aren't paying attention. And for some mods, updating is actually hard, and they weren't able to get it functioning by release day.

Expect a list of "mods that we're waiting for" to come out soon.

I was finally able to determine with the help of some of my forum friends that Minecraft's source code has been updated so as to not allow it from being played in an applet to prevent some inconspicuous bug whereby people who hadn't payed for the game were able to play it in an applet. This fortunately reinvigorated my efforts to determine what was wrong with playing the regular launcher. I was eventually told by the IRC chat for Minecraft that it was my ESET NOD32 antivirus which was causing the problem, and that I was forced to uninstall it in order to play Minecraft and install a different antivirus. I have elaborated on this in the comment I made below, but my problem is unfortunately not yet resolved. Here is where I posted the bug on the official Mojira bug posting site. https://mojang.atlassian.net/browse/MCL-887 However as the original problem has been solved I'll simply leave this as the answer.