[8.04] [hardy] Applets bail frequently in FF3 / JRE6

[Michael Lueck]

Various websites that have Java on them, the applets seem to not work frequently, and a FF browser status bar message says that the applet has bailed. I assume that is a sort of crash.

Baseline testing has been done with Windows / Firefox 2.x / JRE 5. So we are running a different major version of Java and Firefox on Linux.

Here is a test URL you can try:
http://christians-in-recovery.org/homepage

Feel free to try various links to recreate this issue. In the right hand column there is a Java applet which is a Chat Counter... showing how many people are currently logged into the chat system. That appears in the right hand column on all pages.

For example, on one page it will be working, on the next page it will bail, and on the following page it will be working again.

The HTML code is the same from page to page... just a Drupal block which has consistent HTML code.

We also really researched how to code the HTML Java tags correctly, and now have it automatically downloading the latest JRE6 if no Java is on the machine. We found this page which helped us get all of that working:

"(Multiple Browser Supported) Java applet using XHTML 'object' tag"
http://ww2.cs.fsu.edu/~steele/XHTML/appletObject.html

And the code validates as valid XHTML. The vendor suggested code snipped did not do either. Yet, the "bail" errors persist. (Even though the HTML validates as XHTML and JRE6 will be automatically installed if no JRE is found.)

The applets work as expected on the baseline (Windows) platform.

[James Stansell (jamesstansell)]

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (hardy) has 2 Java6 plugins that Firefox could use. If you go to tools -> addons and go to the plugins tab which java plugin(s) do you see listed?

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

This is what I install on my systems...

~$ dpkg -l|grep java
ii java-common 0.28ubuntu3 Base of all Java packages
ii sun-java6-bin 6-07-3ubuntu2 Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (ar
ii sun-java6-jre 6-07-3ubuntu2 Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (ar
ii sun-java6-plugin 6-07-3ubuntu2 The Java(TM) Plug-in, Java SE 6

And FYI: I had recalled some static noise about running Java apps with JRE 6, so that is why we still are at JRE 5 on Windows. This ParaChat application, however, responds much better to JRE 6 on Linux than JRE 5, so that forced the JRE 6 on Linux.

Sorry if I logged this bug against the incorrect package.

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

I think flagging this bug as a dupe is wrong.

No where did I indicate that FF was crashing, which it is not.

Not even all applets on the web pages get a "bail" status. And the applet(s) which bail do not bail on every page the applets are on, nor every time the page is loaded / reloaded.

The difference we see is that with FF 2.x and JRE 5 on Windows, applets never bail. On Linux with FF3 and JRE 6, applets do bail about 50% of the time. JUST THE APPLETS, not the entire browser.

Could you please separate this bug from bug #255681

Thank you

[James Stansell (jamesstansell)]

I agree this doesn't seem like a dup of #255681, especially since they seem to be different JDK implementations.

[Nephelauxetic (nathan-schmid)]

That's weird because the error message appears to be the same. But it
results in a crash on my system (SEGV). I didn't look at it that
carefully but I think that it is not the same, yet a very similar
problem probably.

Cheers
  Nathan

Michael Lueck schrieb:
> *** This bug is a duplicate of bug 255681 ***
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/255681
>
> I think flagging this bug as a dupe is wrong.
>
> No where did I indicate that FF was crashing, which it is not.
>
> Not even all applets on the web pages get a "bail" status. And the
> applet(s) which bail do not bail on every page the applets are on, nor
> every time the page is loaded / reloaded.
>
> The difference we see is that with FF 2.x and JRE 5 on Windows, applets
> never bail. On Linux with FF3 and JRE 6, applets do bail about 50% of
> the time. JUST THE APPLETS, not the entire browser.
>
> Could you please separate this bug from bug #255681
>
> Thank you
>
>

[Doug Holton (edtechdev)]

The page worked fine for me using the new java plugin. It should work when java 6 update 11 hits ubuntu hopefully.

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sun-java6/+bug/291135

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

Thanks for the link DH.

So do you think there is hope that Ubuntu will update 8.04 to that version of the plugin?

[goto (gotolaunchpad)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Jaunty Jackalope. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

Greetings goto. Yes I understand this bug is specific to the 8.04 release. In 8.10 already the problem is fixed.

As DH posted above, "It should work when java 6 update 11 hits ubuntu hopefully." When is JRE6 going to be updated in 8.04 LTS?

[goto (gotolaunchpad)]

Okay, then this should be set to "fix released". If you want the fix to be applied to old packages, you have to do something special...you'd need to search the ubuntu wiki for that.
Thanks.

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

It was not an "old package" when I originally opened the bug report.

It is most aggravating that bugs are swept under the rug of the new version... especially since 8.04 is a LTS release. I am starting to think "big deal" of LTS if this is how the LTS releases are treated!

Not acceptable.

[James Stansell (jamesstansell)]

8.04 has java 6 u17 since about 2 weeks ago. I'm not sure if an update will automatically switch to the new plugin or if some manual action would be required.