Probably not a good option at this time, but would have been the best long-term answer.ī. That would require strict backward compatibility to older versions so that the user would not notice. Change from side-by-side installs to in-place installs - Java 7 gets installed in place of Java 6.
"I actually think the best thing that the user could do is update their browser plug-in to the latest Java 7," he told us, "or simply disable Java in the browser." He also had a number of suggestions for how Oracle could deal with the current situationĪ. InfoQ spoke to Citrin to clarify his position. Worse, it appears that they are taking it upon themselves to replace installations of Java 6 with Java 7 even if the users have only Java 6 on their machines.Īs a result, he says, "You should strongly consider turning off automatic Java updates". Can you imagine if Microsoft released an update to. Some of their applications depend on Java 6, and others might depend on Java 7, and these dependencies are typically hard-coded or configured to point to the correct, and different, file locations. They can be installed side-by-side, and many users have both Java 6 and Java 7 installed on their machines. Yes, Java 6 is a separate product from Java 7. Oracle has decided that, in order to fix extensively-reported security problems, they will not only update Java 7 (their latest version of Java), they will also completely delete a completely separate product. On a blog post Wayne Citrin, Chief Technology Officer of Java/NET interpretability vendor JNBridge wrote The move has proved somewhat controversial. Oracle will then start auto-updating all Windows 32-bit users from JRE 6 to JRE 7 with the update release of Java, Java SE 7 Update 11 (Java SE 7u11), due in February 2013. In December 2012 Oracle will start to auto-update a sample of users from JRE 6 to JRE 7 to evaluate the auto-update mechanism, user experience and seamless migration. To achieve this goal Windows users that rely on Java’s auto-update mechanism will have their JRE 6 replaced with JRE 7. The Java auto-update mechanism is designed to keep Java users up-to-date with the latest security fixes. will start auto-updating Windows 32-bit, Java Runtime Environment (JRE) users from JRE 6 to JRE 7 in December 2012. In the announcement, Oracle said that they In view of this, at the end of last year Oracle began automatically replacing instances of Java SE 6 with Java SE 7 via auto-update.
After that date all new security updates, patches, and fixes for both the runtime and SDK of Java SE 6 will only be available through My Oracle Support, and will therefore only be available to users with a commercial license with Oracle. The last publicly available release of Java 6 is to be released on February 19th 2013.