the Greater Nomadic Council

Mozilla/Firefox is the most W3C compliant browser in existence and anything that adheres to industry standards can be viewed in these browsers. The sites you are thinking of use ActiveX (usually with crappy VB or some other Microsoft only language that no self respecting developer who codes for cross platform compatibility would ever use) which as you recall, you were told ever so recently by Microsoft themselves to set your security settings high in IE thus making anything using ActiveX useless anyway. Irony paid a nice visit to Microsoft lately and took a big bite out of Bill's ass.

But seriously, ActiveX is a standard created by Microsoft for the Microsoft browser running on a Microsoft OS. It is not cross platform, doesn't work for Mac, BSD, Linux, SUN or any other system and it is meant to lock you further into using Microsoft products. So you don't want to support those sites anyway. You want to bitch and bitch and bitch to the people who built/manage them until they comply with industry standards so that ALL browsers can view those pages. Either that or don't use them. The only reason to ever build anything with activeX into a webpage is so you can be hacked. If you don't want to be hacked, stop using ActiveX.

This is yet another reason why open source people are your friends. :)

Oh, I agree 100%, but the fact still remains that there are a number of sites that are not standards-compliant that may, for some strange reason, want to view. Just trying to give fair warning before any takes my, er, your advice. Personally, I've been using Mozilla for I think over two years now and used Opera before that (yeah it's not OSS, but it's better than IE), so my OSS cred is straight. :)

Fair enough. I ever so recently came across a couple sites like that the other day and I made sure everyone knew that I couldn't use their stinky site. This feels like back when I was one of the lone holdouts on Netscape. The nice part though is that now, Firefox and Mozilla has a cool factor and IE is your mom's browser.

It's just the whole underlying Microsoft ideology that irritates me to no end; get the developers to use our languages that only work with our browsers and on our OS and you keep the drones locked in for life. The sad part is I work for a Microsoft vendor right across the campus and I see Steve Ballmer in the hallways every week. He has no clue who I am though but If he did, I'm sure I'd get a punch in the face for spreading this info all over the web today...heh.

The sad part is I work for a Microsoft vendor right across the campus and I see Steve Ballmer in the hallways every week. He has no clue who I am though but If he did, I'm sure I'd get a punch in the face for spreading this info all over the web today...heh.

Speaking of which, I was very surprised to see you pop up on our site after being linked to by much higher profile sites like BoingBoing. Welcome!

Fair enough. I ever so recently came across a couple sites like that the other day and I made sure everyone knew that I couldn't use their stinky site.

I have that problem with internal sites at SBC. Most of them are designed with no thought to browsers other than IE, so to access them I have to run the dreaded beast. At home, though, I don't remember the last time I had to use it, so I went ahead and changed my registry. I haven't completely uninstalled it yet (just in case), but may in the future. One problem I've come across, though. I thought I'd gotten all the registry entries that needed the "-url" option in them, but when I click on the link in MSN Messenger to open my mail (just to test), it only opens a blank Mozilla window instead of Hotmail. It's not all the important, but I like my hacks to work correctly. Any advice?

Speaking for myself, I occasionally have difficulty viewing email attachments using Mozilla which are no problem with IE. I'm sure this Mozilla defect could easily be fixed with the right download, but since a similar dilemna will probably pop up in the future, I'm reluctant to erase IE. The "automatic update" feature, for example, gives them a certain edge over the competition.

As the article says, you can still turn on automatic update. It doesn't require you to have IE. As for email attachments, I'm not sure what kind you're talking about. Unless it's HTML, Flash, or javascript, it shouldn't be opening in your browser anyways. Since you use a webmail client, the browser may just be missing some plugins to handle those attachments, which is quite possible if you installed your browser after installing the various plugins. They're there and available, but sometimes Mozilla doesn't know where to find them without first being told.

I use Hotmail (I know, eewww), which is heavily optimized for IE and difficult to use in other browsers. I use exclusively Mozilla at home, but of course work is another matter entirely.

Heh. Well I get around. Been on the web since 1989 and was the second Xeno on the net. You can still read arguments of it on usenet way back in the day. Plus I like to see who is linking and pay close attention to my logs.

I wanted to quickly point out that Firefox has a ActiveX plug-in that makes those websites that you cannot see in Mozilla, now viewable :)

Also, I wouldn't suggest the Mozilla email client. Instead use Ximian; I have mine set up with Spamassassin as a proxy and it works amazingly well. Th problems you are having with Mozilla mail are probably due to an older build. Mozilla 1.7 is the most stable (though I still suggest Ximian over that... it's part of the Novell and Red Hat Linux builds).

Mozilla at work is tricky but since I'm the web admin, I customize the hell out of my system at work. And I can get my home Linux install to work with my Windows box at work...heh. They won't let me run Linux yet but I know after the first virus, hack or worm that takes down the network, they'll change their mind. :)

I use mutt for my email. I'm hardcore like that. It's good to know there's an ActiveX plugin for Firefox if you want it though.