Firefox and java-1.7.0-openjdk

Question

I have two F-19/64 computers with Firefox 22 that want "Java Runtime Environment" in order to access
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/crossword/ and several others. It appears that java openjdk is installed?

# yum install java-1.*-openjdk
Loaded plugins: langpacks
Package 1:java-1.7.0-openjdk-1.7.0.25-2.3.10.4.fc19.x86_64 already installed and latest version
Package 1:java-1.8.0-openjdk-1.8.0.0-0.9.b89.fc19.x86_64 already installed and latest version 
Nothing to do

I even tried replacing Firefox 22 with 21 but apparently the requires replacing the hidden configuration files also and I didn't want to do that so put FF-22 back. I also hoped to get rid of pdf problems by using RR-21, but that's another query I guess.

Is there a solution to the Java JDK problem?

Answer 1

Plugin and javaws are in icedtea-web package, so please install it, the page will then work for you :) Also please remove java-1.8.0-openjdk unless you know what you are doing. It is experimental beta package :)

Comments

I did:
# yum install icedtea-web
Restarted Firefox, rebooted, the jave jdk is still not recognized.

Earlier I tried yum remove java jdk and it wanted to take Libreoffice as  a dependency! I can do that and re-install it but stopped. Perhaps that is necessary?

Answer 2

The JRE is just the Java (OpenJDK) runtime to run Java apps, desktop apps, and server apps, but not applets. For applets you need to web browser plugin. The web browser plugin is provided by the package
Icedtea-web.

I know where your confusion comes from: in the Windows world, "installing Java" gets you the JRE + the browser plug-in, which is essentially a part of the JRE. Well on Linux it's not, because when Sun open sourced Java under a GPL license back in 2006 creating the OpenJDK project, they did not include the browser plugin component.

I have argued with the JRE developers that Icedtea-web is counter-intuitive and that at least an alias of "openjdk-plugin" should be used, but met with staunch opposition from the Icedtea devs.... so there... Install icedtea-web.