Re: Need advice on reliable way to identify IE as thebrowser

["Dean, Robert" <rdean@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Gecko codebase has built-in support for ActiveX, but it's not enabled in FireFox for security reasons.

What I've been wondering is if there is some overriding reason why the solution has to involve ActiveX as opposed to Silverlight (which is better supported by "other" browsers and has less security potholes to avoid).

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Nathan Andelin
Sent: Wed 7/30/2008 3:37 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Need advice on reliable way to identify IE as thebrowser
 
> From: Pete Helgren
> Alfredo has a more elegant design until someone builds a
> plugin that will run ActiveX in other browsers.  Then things
> will get ugly...

Which begs the question, should we even care about the name of the user agent, or whether it's from Microsoft or Mozilla or whomever?  Are we doing a survey?  Should we write conditional expressions based on isIE?  Or would it be better to write something like:

if (window.ActiveXObject) ..., which may not be supported in Firefox or Opera today, but maybe tomorrow.

Which brings me back to my earlier comment about just asking the DOM if it supports a particular element or method.

Nathan.