Oracle has told customers "don’t believe everything you read on the Internet" as it explains that it will continue to push updates to Java users on Windows XP.
Microsoft cancelled support for the 13-year-old operating system in April, and Oracle quietly announced the end of support for Java on XP in early July.
But in response to customer confusion, Larry Ellison’s firm has released a statement to explain that Oracle no longer supports Java problems unique to XP, but its general Java security updates will continue to work for XP users.
Oracle’s Henrik Stahl wrote in a blog post last Friday: "We expect all versions of Java that were supported prior to the Microsoft de-support announcement to continue to work on Windows XP for the foreseeable future.
"In particular, we expect that JDK 7 will continue to work on Windows XP. Security updates issued by Oracle will continue to be pushed out to Windows XP desktops."
However, he added: "The important point here is that we can no longer provide complete guarantees for Java on Windows XP, since the OS is no longer being updated by Microsoft.
"We strongly recommend that users upgrade to a newer version of Windows that is still supported by Microsoft in order to maintain a stable and secure environment."
Oracle also outlined the fact that Java 8 is not supported on XP, while issues associated with the operating system prevent users from installing it without doing so manually.
Stahl added: "We are looking at possible ways to address this issue [JDK 8 support] but may decide not to – if you are on Windows XP it’s not clear that it’s worth updating to Java 8 without also updating the OS."
