On systems that have not already installed Java for Mac OS X 10.6 update 9 or later, this update will configure web browsers to not automatically run Java applets. Java applets may be re-enabled by clicking the region labeled 'Inactive plug-in' on a web page. If no applets have been run for an extended period of time, the Java web plug-in will deactivate. After installing Java, you may need to reload or quit your browser in order to enable Java in your browser. Note: Java 7 requires an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.7.3 (Lion) or later and administrator privileges for installation. Previous Versions.

Apple has released Java updates for Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7.x and 10.8.x. There’s good news and bad news with these updates, so I’m going to lead off with the good news. Good news: updates Java SE 6 to 1.6.0_37 and otherwise has the same behavior of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 10. If you’re using to make sure that the Java plug-in is active for your web browsers, I’ve verified that this script continues to work. Bad news: uninstalls the Apple-provided Java applet plug-in from /Library/Internet Plug-Ins, which means that web browsers will not be able to launch Java applets from inside the browser. It also removes the Java Preferences application from /Applications/Utilities. The rest of the Java 6 framework is still installed, so CrashPlan and other applications that use Java 6 outside of a browser will still work fine.

However, if you try to access a Java application in a web browser, you will see a Missing Plug-In message. The fix is to click on the Missing Plug-In message and be directed to Oracle’s for Mac OS X. From there, the Java installer will need to be downloaded and installed.

A different version of Java for OS X 10.7 Lion and above is available. Java 1.6 is the latest version of Apple Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

It’s important to note that this process no longer taps into Apple’s Software Update mechanism to install Java. Instead, you would download a disk image from the Oracle website and install an installer package stored inside the disk image. Update –: Apple has released a KBase article on how to re-enable the Apple-provided Java SE 6 applet plug-in and Web Start functionality: Deployment: Oracle’s installer can be installed silently from the command line and does not require a reboot.

Oracle has built in a Sparkle-based update mechanism. If you need to update multiple Macs, you should be able to distribute the Oracle Java installer package using your system management tools. Any tool that can install a standard Apple installer package should be able to distribute the new Java installer. From what I can tell, we can disable the update check by placing a file at: /Library/Application Support/Oracle/Java/Deployment/deployment.properties with the contents: deployment.macosx.check.update=false Normally all Oracle’s Java plugin preferences would be stored in the user’s home (followed by the path above), but it seems that preferences can first be overridden here. Once this is set, if I open the Java control panel, the “Check for Updates Automatically” checkbox is unchecked. It still does a check right then upon opening the panel, but I’d hope this should at least prevent it from checking in the background and prompting the user. For reference, here’s Java 6 documentation on deployment overrides, though I don’t know how much of this is still valid for 7.