firefox not prompt for download required plugins(Java)

I've found the same (on Intrepid with all updates installed). I'm not prompted for java.

I installed a jre (I can't remember which one in Synaptic but it wasn't a sun one) and the java web plugin wouldn't start and just hung firefox. Not really sure what GCJ web plugin is in the Add-ons dialog but disabling that stopped it hanging (when web page loaded, nothing happened instead).

I tried installing different java jre's (inc Sun 6) but always the only thing listed in Add-ons is the GCJ plugin.

I'd expect to see a different entry in Add-ons for each jre that I have installed but I only ever get GCJ. Also, when I uninstalled all jre's, the GCJ entry still remains. And when I had default jre, Open JDK jre, and Sun 6 jre installed and typed java -version, it reckoned there was no java installed and told me which packages to find java in!

So there's definitely something wrong with firefox not prompting for java. There also seems to be a problem that, once installed, firefox doesn't recognise the java plugin/jre. But whether the latter is part of the same problem, I'm not sure - there seems to be a wider problem in that even with 3 jre's installed, my system didn't have a system jvm.

I'm on a Samsung Q35 laptop.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008101315 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.3

Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as confirmed and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!