105674 - Mozilla makes no effort to autodectect java plug-in under Linux

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 84427

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Daniel Lemire]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011012
BuildID:    2001101201

The web page is fine, but applet won't run because there is no JVM by default
with mozilla. However, if you happen to have a JVM installed with a perfectly
valid plugin (such as Sun's), the mozilla installer doesn't seem to make any
effort to detect it or ask you for it.

As I see it, it would simply be a matter of automatically adding a link to the
proper .so file. Detecting the presence of a plug-in should be fairly easy since
Sun's is always installing its JVMs in /usr/java so you should just look there.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install Sun's JVM under Linux 
   (rpm -ivh j2sdk-1_4_0-beta2-linux-i386.rpm for example)

2. You can verify that a mozilla-compatible plugin is available under
/usr/java/j2sdk1.4.0/jre/plugin/i386

3. Install mozilla.

4. Go to a web page with a java applet






Actual Results:  You will then learn that mozilla made no effort to autodetect
your JVM and it won't even ask you if you already have one!!! It will offer you
to download a new plugin entirely (huge download) while you already have to stuff.

Of course, you can go to a console and add a symbolic link at the right place
and restart mozilla... but mozilla should be doing this for you! Or at least, it
should provide a menu for this (konqueror has been doing this for a long, long time)

Expected Results:  Mozilla should attempt to autodetect the JVM and should add
the proper symbolic link to the plugin. If it cannot find it, the user should
still be able to find, somewhere, a nice form where he can enter to location of
his/her java plug-in.

Workaround: add a symbolic link yourself. You have to know what you are doing!

Or else, simply redownload (as root!!!) the whole JVM from Netscape... thus
wasting bandwidth, time and disk space.

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

The installer just installs things, it's a fairly stand-alone component. You're
asking for more smarts in the default plugin (which is what's sending you off to
Netscape's site to install the JVM), which seems reasonable.

--> Plugins

Comment 2

[Peter Janes]

If it makes any difference, the plugin is no longer installed with a symlink,
but by running regxpcom (see bug 100904).

Comment 3

[Daniel Lemire]

>>If it makes any difference, the plugin is no longer installed with a symlink,
but by running regxpcom (see bug 100904).<<

Yes, it makes a difference! It is now much more arcane and given that most
documentation on the web describing how to get java working points to symlink,
this means *many* people will not be able to get the plug-in working. How many
people have even heard of regxpcom?

Here's what I would want to see... when installing mozilla, it starts looking
for the plug-in, then runs regxpcom on it to registrer it.

If not, then when I browser as a user on my machine and mozilla figures out that
the java plug-in is not installed, then it should do so and provide some
convenient way for users to be able to get java working with the administrator
is not available or willing to install it.

Currently, mozilla is being java unfriendly by making sure that java
installation is a serious pain under Linux.

Comment 4

[av (gone)]

--- Mass reassigning Unix bugs to serge ---

Comment 5

[scottputterman]

Moving Netscape owned 0.9.9 and 1.0 bugs that don't have an nsbeta1, nsbeta1+,
topembed, topembed+, Mozilla0.9.9+ or Mozilla1.0+ keyword.  Please send any
questions or feedback about this to [e-mail].  You can search for
"Moving bugs not scheduled for a project" to quickly delete this bugmail.

Comment 6

[serge (gone)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 84427 ***

Comment 7

[shrirang khanzode]

v