Agreed completely. I can't stand this redirect and I couldn't find much on it.
So I took a look at Oracle's source code and this seems to be a valid work-around (Subject to Oracle deployJava changes of course)
function deployQZ() {
// var attributes = {...}
// var parameters = {...}
// Override the installJRE redirect function
deployJava.installJRE = function(requestVersion, ignore) { alert("Sorry, Java " + requestVersion + " does not appear to be installed"); }
deployJava.runApplet(attributes, parameters, '1.5');
}
You could modify this to update a div tag with a message, etc. Thanks for asking because we get a lot of complaints about this.
-Tres