There were several announcements this week about the Consumer JRE, essentially a developer release as a preview for a lighter, faster Java for non-developers to use in their browser.
However it couldn't be further from a consumer release if you tried. First the normal small windows installer was missing when it was announced. Next the modular downloader known as the Java kernel was not ready for the release anyway and there is still some discussion about it even being in the update. As for me the installer failed to update my 32bit windows machine - which we later found out was due to previous JREs not being overwritten and here still isn't a 64bit plugin for windows nearly 3 years after the 64bit port was done.
But the good news is that this was a developer release. It could have been so much better but hopefully the teams will go back and make the real consumer release better. Not just smaller and faster but reliable and high quality too.