How can we stop jre 7 from blowing us all out of the water?

Question

I would like to put forth a issue that greatly concerns me which is java 7. In recent times, some browsers have summarily decided that
they only allow calls to "current" versions of java. So in Mozilla's mindset, the only current version of java now is 6. It is questionable how
feasible it is for someone to manage to get firefox to call an "older" plugin like 1.5, 1.4 or 1.3. Sounds like it requires a lot of manual
configuration on each user's pc. Mozilla has put out conflicting advice on this topic.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Java#Switching_Java_versions_-_Advanced
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/java.html#Issues
So my big concern is that when java 7 is released, Mozilla and other browser vendors can then decide 7 is the current version and make
it nearly impossible to call java 6. Which would be terrible. Oracle would take a fine amount of time to certify 7 and only certify it on the
most recent versions of the software. I forsee great pain and suffering amongst the customers on this. How can this be prevented?
(And why doesn't oracle write it's own browser? If you write your own browser you are free from worrying about this nonsense. Also
the enterprise browser should only connect to enterprise resources and not be used for arbitrary web surfing by the users. Need a way
to restrict such a program.)
http://java.com/en/download/faq/firefox_newplugin.xml
"Starting with Firefox 3.6, Java-based applications will NOT work unless you are running Java version 6 Update 10 or newer. "
"Starting in Firefox 3.6, Mozilla foundation will drop support on OJI (Open Java Virtual Machine Integration) and will only support the standard NPAPI and NPRuntime interfaces. The Java Plug-in which is in Java version 6 update 10 or newer versions supports the NPAPI and NPRuntime interfaces. Therefore, starting with Firefox 3.6, Java-based applets will NOT work unless you are running Java version 6 Update 10 or newer"

Answer 1

From the java download page:
J2SE 5.0 reached its End of Service Life (EOSL) on November 3, 2009, which is the date of the final publicly available update of version 5.0 (J2SE 5.0 Update 22). So not only Mozilla thinks that Java 6 is the only version, even the vendor of java (oracle) thinks that.
Why is it so that everybody thinks that software from the previous millennium (like JInit) of course has to work with software of this millennium (like firefox 3.6)?!? JRE 1.5 is desupported for nearly 2 Years now....and don't get me started on JInitiator which basically was released 11 years ago, but surely you will find someone who has a company standard of IE8 and JInit (and mutters why this does not work anymore). Now there comes the argument that they don't want to upgrade their forms servers or what ever else because they are afraid that the newer version does not work anymore, but surely they are update happy with their browsers, aren't they? So why just move foreward with parts of the configuration?
If you look here you may notice that JRE 1.6 will reach EOL in 2012 (2013 with Java for Business) which is about the same time when Forms 10g will reach EOL, so you not only won't get new certifications with forms 10g, you also won't get new Security Patches etc. for forms 10g. This is a perfect reason why to move on to a newer version in both cases.
I am working for a software vendor myself, and I perfectly understand why software vendors throw away compabilities and start desupporting software after a certain amount of time. If we didn't I still would have to develop my PL/SQL code so it operates flawlessly on Oracle 7 as there were surely customers out there which insisted that this version of the database runs so stable in their site, and they don't need to update as the old database software runs well. And not only that, but the point in time when it takes you longer to actually find the affected versions and patch the fix of a critical bug in all those versions takes longer than finding the bug itself (been there, done that) it is time to throw some old versions out of the window, desupport them and clean the trunk code.
Bottom line is: if you want to keep one part of your software Jurassic you better keep the whole configuration at the same age. Old software is never meant to run against software from 10 years in the future, and in the opposite it is quite an impossible task to write an infinite backward compatible software.
cheers