Some Notes on the Machines

Here’s something interesting:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/java/openjdk/download

It’s called Amazon Corretto.

As of this writing (2017-05-16), the situation is in flux. Items:

• The historical closed-source uberstandard for both Java virtual machine and plugin, this being Oracle (originally Sun), is supporting plugins for its current version, 8, but has announced a ceasing of plugin support for 9.
• The open-source plugin standard, IcedTea, shows no signs of weakening, and works very well indeed with both Oracle’s Java and the open-source OpenJVM and others as well. However, no Windows porting is known to this author.
• Firefox and Chrome do not support Java in their current versions. There is an Extended Support Release version of Firefox which does, for a little while longer.
• Pale Moon, a very distinctive Mozilla/Firefox variant, is reported to support Java.
• Opera is reported to support the Oracle/Sun JVM only.
• Midori is reported to support both Oracle’s and IcedTea.

The author is working on practical tests of the last three.

The latest stable version of Chrome does not support Java by default. Oracle has a tweak, but it did not work:

http://www.java.com/en/download/faq/chrome.xml#npapichrome

I have read in other resources of a combination of tweaks, the above plus one or two more, which may work. Regardless, this does not bode well for Java under Chrome in the short and mid-term. Oracle will either create a Chrome-standard add-on quickly, or Chrome will run Java only with overrides left in for “advanced” users, and will become entirely non-Java-compatible in September:

http://blog.chromium.org/2014/11/the-final-countdown-for-npapi.htm

Here are some very interesting contributions from Microsoft:

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Java-Automatic-and-Update-a053d98c

Use the RPM Sun gives, for 1.6.0/24. But you’ll need libnpjp2.so instead of the old ones (there are two old ones), and the ‘alternatives’ system works. More here soon.