Is Java 6's Desktop.browse() likely to be unsupported on any system I'll encounter?

I see the new Desktop class (which I'd like to use for its browse(uri) method) includes checks to verify that it's supported. If I'm distributing my application for multiple operating systems, should I expect that it will sometimes be unsupported, and stick in code like this "Bare Bones Browser Launch" as a fallback method, or would that be extremely rare? Any particular OSes for which I m开发者_运维知识库ight expect problems?

(I'm distributing for Mac/Win/Solaris/Linux, but feel free to answer about any exceptional OSes if you know something about them.)

You should program defensively.

From How to Integrate with the Desktop Class:

Use the isDesktopSupported() method to determine whether the Desktop API is available. On the Solaris Operating System and the Linux platform, this API is dependent on Gnome libraries. If those libraries are unavailable, this method will return false

(emphasis mine)

I think the point is the reverse, what does Java require an OS to support? They are giving an OS an out, by allowing the JVM implementer to just return false, say it is not supported, and move on, and still be 100% Java compliant (whether or not that is "write once run anywhere" I'll leave to your own evaluation).

Techniques like the Bare Bones Browser Launch or more complicated libraries like BrowserLauncher, will always only work on a limited set of OSs and browsers than what generic code that is made for the general Java standard is going to give you.

So the upshot is, use a technique like the Bare Bones launcher if an OS you are specifically targeting doesn't support Desktop.openURL, but then you will have to write it to specifically work on that OS - there is no reason to think that the technique works for a given OS and a given JVM on that OS, it just represents what we used to have to do to launch a browser prior to Java 6.