Why offer download, when no URL supplied?
I was just doing a few quick checks based
on the previous thread by Baski (sorry, I have
no new/interesting information to offer on that
specific question), and noticed a disturbing
thing.
Here is a series of three images (total
<100Kb) that demonstrate the experience
the user sees if they have insufficient Java
to run the application, but no download
URL is supplied in the J2SE element.
http://www.physci.org/jws/upgrade.html
The first image shows a dialog which asks
"Do you want this JRE to be downloaded
and installed?"
If the user clicks 'OK', not only does the
the launch fail with the vague message
"Unable to launch the application",
but it requires clicking theDetails button,
selecting theConsole tab, and scrolling
to thebottom of the output before they
canfinally see the descriptive message
"#### The application has requested a
version of the JRE (version 1.8+) that
currently is not locally installed. Java
Web Start is unable to automatically
download and install the requested
version. This JRE must be installed
manually."
JWS should provide that message initially,
centered in a dialog, instead of prompting for
download, then hiding the message in the
console.
To put that another way..
Why evenoffer the JRE download, when no
download URL is supplied?
