I want the entire JDK6 tree thrown out with the garbage.

Personally, I couldn't care less about JRE size. But then I do 99% server applications and about 1% desktop (and that mainly for personal use) so there's no such problem as customers having to download a JRE on the fly (and when they do, it's corporate customers on LANs where such things are rolled up in automatic software distributions taking place outside office hours so the end users never notice). What I care about more than anything (and which is the main reason we rejected 6 as a runtime platform let alone a development platform (the new "features" are another major point in that) is stability. The stability of 6 is seriously degraded from 1.5, enough so that we could in tests not rely on our systems to remain stable for days let alone the weeks or better yet months we require. Performance is no problem, but 1.5 is just as fast by now because the majority of performance improvements over 1.4 and early 1.5 releases have also been implemented on that by now.

the new plugin works great on windows, linux and solaris (I cant speak for Mac because I don't have one) The only windows only features are Direct3D hardware acceleration and the quickstarter which is something like eager vs. lazy loading... I prefer lazy ;)

Well, JNLP-littering is still an annoying issue on Firefox/Mac.