My friend and fellow auctioneer Don Hamit pointed out to me at the KAA auctioneer contest yesterday that the recently-released Chrome doesn’t work with the recently-funded real-time Internet bidding platform Proxibid. I was able to get the Proxibid Bidder App to run in Chrome on XP and Vista. Here’s how to get it, and other Java applications, to run on Chrome.
Java is a browser add-on that functions as a virtual machine. It’s a way for programmers to write code for an interpreted environment which in tern can be installed on multiple devices, operating systems and browsers. Rather than writing specific code for IE on Windows and then starting from scratch to write code on Safari on Mac, a programmer can choose to write an application in Java and have it run in the Java environment on multiple platforms.
Chrome doesn’t work with any current version of Java. In order to get Java applications to run on Chrome, you have to download a pre-release, or beta, version of Java called Java SE 6 update 10 RC.
Once you’ve downloaded and installed it, the only other difference between Chrome and other browsers I’ve used is that Chrome treats the Java .jnlp file as a download rather than something that can be automatically executed. That only means that you have to open the file once it’s downloaded. I was able to simply click on the file at the bottom of the screen to get it to run in XP. In Vista I had to click the arrow to bring up the menu and then select ‘run’.
If you have other difficulties with Proxibid or find other applications that don’t work in Chrome other than the previously-mentioned Secunia web scan, let me know in the comments.