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There is no way we could require users to use Firefox (we're not going to limit our customer base no matter how cool the technology), but if a plugin existed for IE that we could distribute, we would happily go down this path.

Mozilla ActiveX Control. Try it; you'll like it. The API for this control is so similar to IE's API that you literally have to change two lines of code: one to add the GUID for CLSID_MozillaBrowser and one to replace the reference to CLSID_Browser (IE) with one to CLSID_MozillaBrowser.

You mean the Mozilla ActiveX Project? Allows you to embed the Gecko engine into anything that uses the IE ActiveX control.

While this may not be exactly the same thing AOL is using, it's interesting and topical nonetheless:

Mozilla ActiveX Project
Mozilla ActiveX Control

Like it or not, a lot of corporations have at least 1 browser-based ActiveX control that their employees must use. Allowing Mozilla to run these programs would eliminate a major barrier to entry.

The point in supporting IE rendering is that a large number of pages just don't work with Mozilla or refuse to render "correctly". For this reason, some browsers strive for bug-for-bug compatibility with MSIE.

Of course, that isn't to say that these are necessarily good or bad decisions, or that there aren't better solutions out there. Just that it's easy to understand these decisions and the motivations behind them even if you don't necessarily agree with them.

While this may not be exactly the same thing AOL is using, it's interesting and topical nonetheless:

Mozilla ActiveX Project
Mozilla ActiveX Control

Like it or not, a lot of corporations have at least 1 browser-based ActiveX control that their employees must use. Allowing Mozilla to run these programs would eliminate a major barrier to entry.

The point in supporting IE rendering is that a large number of pages just don't work with Mozilla or refuse to render "correctly". For this reason, some browsers strive for bug-for-bug compatibility with MSIE.

Of course, that isn't to say that these are necessarily good or bad decisions, or that there aren't better solutions out there. Just that it's easy to understand these decisions and the motivations behind them even if you don't necessarily agree with them.

n the Windows world, developers can just embed the IE browser using an ActiveX control. I'll bet that a lot of commercial developers would have no problem dropping the IE control in exchange for a Gecko control

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm

Linky please? I'd like more information on this for my projects, and a google search for "gecko#" just turns up pages on the care and feeding of small lizards ;) Does it work in cross-platform mono?

In the Windows world, developers can just embed the IE browser using an ActiveX control. I'll bet that a lot of commercial developers would have no problem dropping the IE control in exchange for a Gecko control

I am using the Mozilla GRE ActiveX. in fact, I filed a bug report on it yesterday. The drawbacks are that it's a seperate install (even if moz/firefox is present), whereas IE is always present on a windows machine, that the API is not complete, and well, the bug report that I filed.

1. Download Mozilla.
2. Find the mozctl.dll file.
3. Register as ActiveX control.
4. Profit!!!

More Info:
http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/

Unfortunately for them, their own plans are about to lead them to cultural ruin. Bush's plan to provide High Speed internet to the nation should be read as what to him would seem akin to the Rural Electrification Project. Where the idea was, lets get power to the people out in the farms so they will be more competive and produce more. That sort of backfired. They got used to the power and started wanting more. More TVs, DVD, Fancy cars and the lowly Banana.

The upshot was that the young started to abandon the farms in droves. As they did the cheap labor of the farm children was replaced by cheap labor from immigrants. The old cycle was that the Farm would be inherited by the children of the farmer and next generation would take over. As the found new jobs as computer programmers and got MBAs they let their parents sell of the old family farm to large agro businesses. Large Farms got larger and Cities got bigger.

Wiring the rest of the county will give reason for companies to relocate to cheaper parts of the US and bring good jobs to town who's main income was the local speed trap. If your a Conservative Rural Republican in a Red State, visions of selling farmland to city slickers for housing and commercial parks must seem like heaven. Voting for Bush was voting your pocketbook.

Now here comes the other side of the coin. Unlike mining towns of the 19th and early 20th Century you really can't lock people in. Your neigbors will undercut your housing deals because they all got buckets of land and nobody to grow whatever.

City Slicker Programmers and the upper skilled workforce are not Conservative Rural Republicans, There those damn Blue State Liberals. They eat fish RAW!!!!, A lot of them aren't even from the USA, most dress like they were extras in that confusing movie The Matrix. As Techs and Tech businesses move to the boondocks they will turn the red states blue.

Right now the current FUD is that Liberals don't respect people with Faith. The fact is that the rural people can't afford to break the back of the liberal technology complex. Ever wondered why Strict harsh and very communist China hasn't stompped all over Hong Kong? China needs Hong Kong more then Hong Kong needs China.

since Internet Explorer is an integral part of the OS

Another way to do this is to back up iexplore.exe, calling it windowsupdate.exe, and then patch iexplore.exe (or any other application linking to mshtml.dll) with the Mozilla ActiveX control.

and for some fun.. read "stainless steel rat for president!".

funny scifi novel from a funny series.. in which iirc there's a line saying that the reason why the dictator uses electronic voting is because it's easily rigged ;).

You can use Moz in VB apps, you know.

Moll.

Ah yes, it's really so tough. (That's sarcasm.)

by Adam Lock

gewg_

I'm not sure about the rest by you can replace embedded IE in 2 minutes using this utility.

I'm not sure about the rest by you can replace embedded IE in 2 minutes using this utility.

The first is an interface-compatible Gecko baesd replacement for MSHTML. This is good, because we can use it in the Wine project as a placeholder until a real MSHTML clone is developed.

There exists such a control, but it often won't work as advertised. Because applications that use MSHTML don't expect to be patched to use the Gecko control instead, applications that use MSHTML tend to couple themselves to VBScript, nested ActiveX controls (the second issue you mention), and other proprietary IE technologies more closely than web sites.

Uh oh. The Beast has alsoinvaded the OSS world!

The goggles, they do nothing!

My mistake. I assumed he was talking about the Plug-in For Hosting ActiveX Controls

[Create a drop-in replacement for MSHTML.dll that uses the Gecko engine.] Then IE would be standards compliant

True, but...

and so would all the Windows apps that rely on the IE rendering subsystem for HTML rendering.

Not necessarily. What happens when one runs IEPatcher on an application that relies on one of Microsoft's proprietary extensions to web technologies, such as VBScript, the IE DOM, or nesting of ActiveX controls? In general, a client-side app will couple itself closer to IE than a public web page will, as 1. fewer people have patched client-side apps to use the Gecko control than have switched to the dino or the panda for web browsing, and 2. the overwhelming majority of such Windows apps' EULAs forbid modification to the binaries such as the use of IEPatcher.

(Sorry, but I have to say that this wasn't originally clear.)

So what you want is Mozilla ActiveX Control then?

"I hope that someone modifies the Gecko rendering system to something that can be a full replacement for IEs, and you can actually view a page the way its supposed to look while using IE (and all the programs that use IEs rendering engine for inline HTML proccessing)."

You mean something like
this?

It's the Gecko engine turned in to an ActiveX control that is functionally compatible with the IE control. There is even a tool on the site that can scan and patch programs with IE embedded (such as AOL, Winamp, etc.) to use the Mozilla control.

Need to run an ActiveX control doesn't necessarily mean anything if you're running Mozilla on Windows.

There's a fairly well-done plugin that allows Mozilla to host ActiveX controls, see here

That link is to the Mozilla ActiveX Control. That lets you use the Mozilla browser (gecko) in your own applications. Just like you can build your own browser interface with IE, you can do it with Mozilla/Gecko using that control. It won't let you run ActiveX plugins from within Mozilla/Firefox. For that you need the Mozilla ActiveX plug-in.

Mozilla ActiveX Plugin

The url for the ActiveX Plugin

You mean this?

I use it to render in "Netscape" when working in Homesite.

Do you mean something like the Mozilla ActiveX control?

And it works in IE like any other ActiveX (the webpage is not that clear as you can use the control in any Windows application), we did some tests for a project some months ago.

Already being worked on and used.

There's the Mozilla ActiveX Control which sounded like the thing to run ActiveX in Mozilla, but it's really a thing to control Mozilla with ActiveX.

And there's this IEPatcher thing which seems to already be able to patch an IE-using program to use Mozilla. Proceed at your own risk, of course.

I agree that an official Mozilla open source drop-in DLL would be nice, but I just wanted to point out that it looks like some people are working towards what you suggest.

Just install Mozilla ActiveX support. May not be the most secure thing in the world, but at least it works. There's some information on securing it on the download page. I'm guessing it's probably a bit more secure than the default IE ActiveX implementation.

No, you can get unofficial Active X for Moz.

Active X being another huge hole which Mozilla will never support.

Wrong!

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm

Does it work with the activex plugin for mozilla?
http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm

I'm curious but not enough so to put a hole like activex in firefox.

Actually, if Microsoft factored their code properly there would be almost nothing to Internet Explorer -- a few high level calls to standard libraries and that would be that

And actually, it probably is just a few high level calls, since the web browser component of IE is implemented as a series of COM interfaces. The Mozilla ActiveX project attempts to provide a Mozilla implementation of those controls, and from a development standpoint and provided the project finishes implementing all the interfaces, it shouldn't be difficult at all to switch MS programs to using embedded Mozilla instead of embedded IE. Of course, it's doubtful Microsoft would allow that.

In case you're wondering how things would be like if this were possible, imagine opening Internet Explorer but having Mozilla be the web browser component inside. Or clicking on Help and Support Center and getting HTML pages rendered by Mozilla instead of IE. Or opening HTML Help documents (.chm) and seeing Mozilla used instead.

Similarly, you could probaly replace DirectX with your own implementations. Impossible, you say? One time I wanted to play Rogue Spear on a computer without a sound card, but the game refused to run without sound. I ended up writing a stub DirectSound DLL that implemented all the necessary DirectSound interfaces but had them do nothing, and went ahead and played Rogue Spear without problems :D

Heep an eye on the Mozilla ActiveX project. On there is a number of things:
- An activex plugin that lets you run activex controls in Mozilla (be very careful with this, read the docs - you can lock it down to host just the controls you need)
- A way of embedding Mozilla into other browsers using activex
- A means of making IE support Netscape type plugins (which it used to at one time)
- An activex plugin for legacy browsers like Netscape 4

Unfortunately they're having problems getting this to work in Firefox 0.9 but keep an eye on that page for what you want.

It may be slightly inconvenient, but at least the Mozilla extension system isn't a blank check to hackers like IE's ActiveX system.

How about a ... plugin to fix that? :-)

Great idea. The Mozilla ActiveX Control is actively maintained, we just need some easy instructions to embed this on our sites and several problems are fixed.

Linky...

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm

You simply cannot rip khtml out of KDE without breaking a bunch of (critical) applications.

But can't one make a wrapper that exposes a KHTML compatible interface to the outside but uses Gecko internally? Somebody managed to make Gecko for the MSHTML API so that almost any program that uses IE can be patched to use Gecko instead. (Granted, document.all and other IEisms won't work, but the basics do work.)

In fact, on the activex plugin homepage, it says the following:

This plug-in is not part of the Mozilla distribution and even if it were it would be disabled by default. It is extremely, hell-freezing-overly, unlikely that Mozilla is ever going to support ActiveX by default. This plug-in is designed for custom, legacy and intranet solutions and nothing else. If you want scripting in Mozilla then the use of XPConnect via the NPAPI is the only recommended method and strongly encouraged - it's actually a lot more powerful and tightly coupled to Mozilla (e.g. complete and full access to the DOM, cross platform support etc.). Go here for more info. The ActiveX plug-in will always be a poor second best.

Until they tried to reach an "active X required" page...

Of course, it is generally advised to turn off activex for security reasons...Although there is a plugin to run activex in Mozilla ( http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm ).

There's already an ActiveX Project for Moz.

This page has an application called IEPatcher:

IEPatcher is a tool to scan an executable or DLL and patch it to replace instances of the IE control with the Mozilla control. Since both controls are binary compatible, this is just a matter of replacing the CLSID_WebBrowser with CLSID_MozillaBrowser. If you have built the Mozilla browser, try running the patcher on an app that uses IE and see if it works!

I've yet to try it, but it sounds like exactly what I wanted.

Mozilla/Firefox will not have "won" the war until the majority of programmers under MS Windows, upon needing to add an HTML render widget, or HTTP downloader, or FTP downloader to their app, do so by invoking the appropriate DLL from Mozilla rather than the IE/Windows DLL.

I came across a Mozilla ActiveX Control that implements some of the web browser interfaces, including IWebBrowser. I have yet to try it and don't know how well it works, but perhaps this will suffice when all that is needed is an HTML widget. If you're not familiar with COM and IWebBrowser, an identical implementation of the interfaces would be extremely easy to use instead of the Microsoft-provided implementation. You basically change the ID of the interface implementation you want to create, which is essentially one important line of code, and the rest of the code stays the same.

As for HTTP and FTP downloading, Microsoft provides APIs for that, and quite frankly, they're easy enough to use that I doubt Mozilla/Firefox will be able to replace them. An HTML control replacement, however, would be nice, especially if it can be packaged into a single lightweight DLL.

What if you just use http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm ?

You should look harder for things.

Sorry, if you let your users use insecure software when there are alternatives, you are an incompetent sysadmin. If you made a stink about it and got slapped down, it's the management's fault, but if you acquiesced, it's your fault.

Send the excuses elsewhere.

Your wrong about broadband. It's quite readily available, and at a reasonable price. IOL has 16Gb cap at 47Euro/month, or 8Gb at 39Euro. UTV has 8Gb at 30Euro, Eircom have something similar, at to netsource. There are many, many companies offering satellite or wireless broadband in the country too. The situation with broadband in Ireland was very bad a few years ago, but its very reasonable not. Get your facts straight. Check out these links:
http://www.iol.ie/broadband/
http://www.u.tv/internet/services/clicksilver/inde x.asp
http://home.eircom.net/broadband/

You can use the Mozilla Active X Control to embed Mozilla. I've actually converted a few apps that I use with embeded IE to use the embeded Mozilla instead.

Unfortunately it increases the size of your distribution a little, since you can't assume Mozilla exists on the end user machine.

The system proposed for use in Ireland and dismissed by the Commission's report today is the Nedap/Powervote system, variants of which are used in the Netherlands and parts of Germany. It's a kiosk-based DRE system which uses glorified memory sticks to store ballot records. It was developed in apparent ignorance of the voter-verification requirement.

Because the developers used the waterfall method, and didn't find out about the audit requirement until customer acceptance testing, they baulked at the idea of going back to the drawing board, and instead bolted on a useless printout-of-ballot-module-contents facility, and called it an audit trail.

Their salesmen are very good, and the Irish Government agreed to buy the system (total cost over 40 million euros) at the height of the Florida debacle in late 2000. Since then there have been reports, objections, and all manner of outcry from IT professionals in Ireland. Even the entire Opposition (elected politicians not belonging to the ruling coalition) opposed the system. The Government maintained a constant mantra: the system is accurate, the system is thoroughly tested, you're all a bunch of Luddites for thinking differently. Eventually the Irish Computer Society joined in, and the Minister promptly accused them of being a front for the anti-globalisation movement.

The writing then being on the wall, the Government then appointed an independent Commission to examine the system and its testing, hoping for a graceful way out of the political corner. The Commission's report, however, is rather more damning than they hoped. In my personal opinion, this has more than a little to do with the fact that noted software expert David Parnas assisted the Commission, and he's a good deal more methodical and careful than Nedap/Powervote seem to have been.

--Adrian.

Except that ActiveX is available for mozilla. So really, the only reason that MS requires IE is to lock you in, not any real technical reason.