Colorado State University

This post is marked as Deprecated and therefore contains outdated information.

We have been seeing more and more reports of Java not working properly in web browsers.  This article should allow a user to get things back up and running.  First, here is a complete article describing what the settings are and what they do, and goes into how you can add sites to a trusted list, or simply edit the default security setting which will allow java web applets to prompt to ‘run’ before doing so.

http://www.java.com/en/download/help/jcp_security.xml

The safest way to allow java to run is to only identify and list the sites you know you use.  However, as usual, security is at odds with ease of use, and we rarely know the exact URLs for the sites we need.  As a result, I recommend we combine some ease of use, with common sense, and set the default security level to “Medium”.  The medium level will still prompt a user before it runs a java applet with the web browser, so a user should only allow these to run, when they expect it.

Accessing the Java Control Panel to adjust this setting is the first step.  Here are directions:

http://www.java.com/en/download/help/jcp_security.xml#control%20panel

Once you have this open, you will click on the ‘Security’ tab, and slide the Security Level down to “Medium”.  Now, click Apply and close the Java Control Panel.  At this point, restart your web browser, and give the content another try.

Enjoy!