Java 7 and Mac OS X

After getting my new Mac Mini pretty well set up with my development tools, I started playing with Amazon AWS. When trying to connect to one of my instances using their built in tool, Firefox bailed and I was presented with a prompt asking me if I wanted to install Java:

To open “Firefox,” you need a Java SE 6 runtime. Would you like to install one now?

Now this message looked very official, and I’d seen it before when starting up something on a new Mac that required Java, but since I’d already installed the latest JDK I was thoroughly confused. I thought, “OK, maybe you didn’t install Java after all”

So I popped open a terminal and

mini:~ robweaver$ java -version
java version “1.7.0_09″
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_09-b05)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.5-b02, mixed mode.

OK, so that’s not it – so I changed browsers and tried the browser check at http://javatester.org again, only to get the same results …

Ouch – so I dug around a bit, and couldn’t find anything about how to fix it. And in fact the little bit I did find only confirmed that the browser plugin was active and the right version.

So finally I decided to punt and just let it install – Clicking the button to to let it start ran a package that looked like it was installing something, and when it was done another trip to javatester.org showed that somehow the plugin had been fixed and was now giving me the right version of Java in all my browsers.

The only thing I can guess is that there was something that had to be set up on first use, but it did give me a start when being asked to install Java SE 6. Fortunately, whatever it did, it didn’t muck with my JVM and I’ll just have to hope that it didn’t break anything elsewhere.