As a dedicated Firefox-user who dislikes the direction Chrome is taking, I still say Firefox has a problem here. This is something real users are experiencing.
I believe this as a whole will have a very negative impact on Firefox's perception in the java-heavier regions of the internet.
And damage done is hard to repair. Mozilla should think carefully and very quickly about what they just have done.
Edit: My bank's facebook page is already filling up with customers saying they can't log in. When the bank's reply is "Dont use Firefox. Firefox is broken" and the customer indeed can log in with other browsers, what chance do you think there is for the user going back to Firefox?
Mozilla needs to get 24.1 java-enabled-edition out there now, until it gets its UI/UX story straight.
Edit 2: Down-vote as you like. If you don't think this will affect Firefox's perception, you are a tad more optimistic than I am.
Given Javas security history, this seems correct.
> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1643240/outdated_java.pn...
The problem is that this dialog box is outright lying. It will show that placeholder even with the latest version of Java installed.
Firefox is open source software. Open source software should be trustworthy. Software which lies to you is by definition not.
As things stand here, right now, it's Firefox which has a problem.