Software Update: Oracle Java 7 Update 55 / 8 Update 5

Oracle has released update 55 for version 7.0 of both the Java Standard Edition development kit and runtime environment. It is a regular and planned update, which Oracle comes four times a year. In this update we find the usual collection of bug fixes and security updates. More information can be found in the release notes.

New Features and Changes

The frequency of some security dialogs has been reduced on systems that run the same RIA multiple times. see 8029649.

Using “*” in Caller-Allowable-Codebase Attribute.

If a standalone asterisk

is specified as the value for the Caller-Allowable-Codebase attribute, then calls from JavaScript code to RIA will show a security warning, and users have the choice to allow the call or block the call. For more information, seeJAR File Manifest Attributes for Security documentation . see8033731

.

Bug Fixes This release contains fixes for security vulnerabilities. For more information, seeOracle Critical Patch Update Advisory

. For a list of bug fixes included in this release, see JDK 7u55 Bug Fixes

page.

The following are some of the notable bug fixes in this release:Area
: deploy/pluginSynopsis

: java plugin compatibility with windows 8.1 / IE 11 enhanced protected mode

Starting in this release Java Plug-in is compatible with Windows Enhanced Protected Mode (EPM) on Windows 8.1 and IE 11. You should no longer see any warning related to EPM when trying to run an applet in Internet Explorer (IE). There is a special case for 64-bit Windows – EPM requires both 32-bit and 64-bit Plug-in installed. Please make sure you have both 32-bit and 64-bit JRE installed, otherwise there will be a warning from IE, but Java Plug-in will still run under EPM.

Freeware