I have discovered that navigating to a site that I control will kick off JRE (observed in Task Manager) if I browse with FireFox and if FF has the Java(TM) Platform installed as a plugin. The site does not need Java (it does use JavaScript) and if the Java Plugin is disabled on FF then the JRE is not loaded.
Does anyone know why this happens?
I do have one theory but it's a weak one: The site uses compression when sending HTML to the browser to make it faster and more responsive. I am wondering if the Java Platform has a more efficient decompressor and if Firefox sees that plugin available it uses it to run the page decompression instead of using its built in one.