Why does Oracle still ship Java 8 for the non-developer desktop JRE?

Question

With the advent of Java 11, the common consumer JRE is 3 whole feature releases behind. Would it not make sense to update by now, or does Oracle just intend for developers to set their source compatibility to Java 8?

Answer 1

This is because they're switching to a long-term service (for stability) and non-long-term-service (for new features) model for support timelines. Java 8 was the previous LTS version, so for stability reasons, it has been the default version pushed on people and not 9 or 10.

Java 11 is their very latest LTS version, but it just came out. I'm assuming they want to iron out any found bugs before recommending it more generally, but you'd have to ask Oracle to find out for sure.