[PLUG] Java plugin missing or moved, access via symlink? (Re: Opera-6.0.3 crashing constantly)

[Karl M. Hegbloom]

On Tue, 2002-12-03 at 08:39, Rich Shepard wrote:
>   Has anyone seen this behavior before?

Yes, just yesterday, with Mozilla.  I had just upgraded Java from
j2re1.3 to j2re1.4, and the symlink in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins that
leads to the actual plugin had not been updated to point to the new
location.  Since it had not changed, Mozilla still thought it had a Java
plugin, registered during previous runs.  Whenever I would click on a
link to a page with a silly java applet (see below) it would crash.

Apparently, Mozilla does not have very good exception handling in that
area.  I need to report this as a bug...  Both against Mozilla, and
against that j2re1.4 Debian package.  (It tries to run the
"update-alternatives", but that had no effect for some reason I could
not quickly deduce.)

The solution was to fix the symlink and restart Mozilla.  Accessing
"help | about plugins" told me that it now could "see" the version 1.4
java runtime plugin.  Access to a page with a silly java applet worked
again, with no crash.  Check your setup, by listing plugins, etc, and
looking around in the plugin directories, and see whether all is in
order.  Perhaps the crash you are experiencing has similar causes.

Silly java applets...  Why does http://www.portlandstatebookstore.com/
need a java applet for the menu on the left?  An HTML table and perhaps
a little javascript (ecmascript) would have sufficed quite nicely.  When
I click on that java applet, the entire page refreshes anyhow, so it's
not like it makes the interface any nicer.  It's not even a tree menu! 
(and a tree menu can be done without a Java applet anyhow.)