In general, browsers (I see this esp. with Safari) are kind enough to inhibit a Java applet from running if it senses that a security related update for Java exists. It seems to do this quietly... my applet just "sits-and-spins" in the browser window - never executes. Is there a way, preferably via JavaScript, to programmatically determine whether or not this condition will exist (so that, for example, applet loading can be skipped and some kind of informational message can be displayed)?
In my particular case, my applet quietly did nothing when launched with Java 1.6.0_37 (on Mac OSX 10.6, Safari 5.1.7). As soon as I updated to Java 1.6.0_43, the applet ran without incident.