Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Java 7u7 and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

Yesterday I had the most bizarre bug since I installed Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8). I find it perfect, much more than Lion (10.7), but, as I was saying, yesterday was strange. I had to use a Java Applet, in order to fill in notes for students. Nowadays, everyone is arguing about why and how you should uninstall Java, either from your system or from Firefox or whichever browser you are using.
Well, seeing the recent bugs discovered in Java 6u35, I decided to upgrade to Java 7u7, not an official upgrade from Apple but nevertheless an update found on Oracle's website. Once I installed it, proud and happy, I went to the university, and found out that nothing was working with the applet I should have used to fill in notes. I had a computer available in an office at the university, running an old Windows XP with Firefox 3.6.16. At least it worked, but I wanted to dig a little deeper anyway.
First, I noticed that none of my previous application requiring Java (say, jTagger or jDownloader) were working, but I didn't had the slightest idea if it was caused by the update or by me trying to uninstall Java. Turns out it was the update, and that neither application was compatible with Java 7. Fortunately, I had another computer lying around (the tests were made on my Macbook Air [in French], and I hadn't made the Java update on my Macbook Pro, which was suffering another bug but I'll talk about it later), and this computer ran the software cited just fine.
Just to be clear : the Java Preferences utility is very fine, and I was able to get jTagger and jDownloader running on the Macbook Air in no time, save for a reboot after choosing "Java SE 6 - 64-bit" in the utility. I could even, in case something with the old Java installation went very wrong, install the older Java 6u35 available from Apple.
But Firefox kept hanging on the Java Applet, the Java plugin for Firefox having been updated with the Java 7 update. So I zipped-up the JavaAppletPlugin.plugin from /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ on the Macbook Pro, and transferred it to the Macbook Air to replace the newer one.
Everything worked fine from here. If you need this (older) plugin, download it here, it might save you time from wondering what went wrong. Uncompress it in /System/Library/Java/Support/CoreDeploy.bundle/Contents/ and place a link for it in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/.