Apple recently released a Java update for OS X 10.5 (Update 10) and OS X 10.6 (Update 5).
- http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1360 - Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 5
- http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1359 - Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 10
That update has removed support for the Java plugin2 for the OS X 10.5 version, so Firefox 4 and later and other browsers like Google Chrome no longer have a Java plugin on Mac OS X 10.5.8 (Intel).
- /questions/844734 FF5 for Mac-java stopped working and can't find plugin after recent Java for Leopard update
With this release, we have greatly enhanced the functionality of Plugin2 on Mac OS X 10.6, but this came at the cost of having to remove Plugin2 from Mac OS X 10.5, due to the lack of necessary OS graphics primitives and the capabilities of J2SE 5.0. We are looking forward to making Plugin2 the default applet plug-in in the near future, so please let us know if there are show stopping issues that prevent your applets from running inside it.
Our best regards,
Mike Swingler
Java Runtime Engineer
Apple Inc.
>> With this release, we have greatly enhanced the functionality of Plugin2
> on Mac OS X 10.6,
>> but this came at the cost of having to remove Plugin2 from Mac OS X
> 10.5, due to the lack
>> of necessary OS graphics primitives and the capabilities of J2SE 5.0.
>
> So, does this mean the security update is breaking support for Java on
> Firefox and Google Chrome with MacOS X 10.5 ?
> Regular users would certainly not understand that when reading the
> detailed information for the update...
Firefox and Chrome users are currently unsupported on PPC since the current versions of those browsers are = Intel-only. Anyone with an Intel Mac should upgrade to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to continue to receive any updates at all.
Plugin2 in it's current state was barely usable when run under J2SE 5.0 anyway, so in the end, anyone who was relying on applets on Leopard was probably already using Safari anyway.
I hope this helps clarify why we discontinued Plugin2 on 10.5,
Mike Swingler
Java Engineering
Apple Inc.