Nicolas Lehuen's Weblog

Why, a new Oracle-branded Java Web Start splash screen, of course !

Before (up until 1.6.0_20) :

After :

It takes time to get used to it…

To be fair, this update contains truly interesting things, like a new version of the Hotspot VM (17.0), a better performing VisualVM and tons of bugfixes.

Check the release notes (notice the improvements in the Java web site since Oracle took over). You can compare them with the previous ones and derive whatever conclusions you want