At 1/18/05, Stephen Koch wrote: >PE works great in FireFox. That is great to hear! Thanks for the feedback. I'll try to fix any bugs reported to me by this coming Saturday, but after that I'll be traveling for several weeks. More responses inserted below ... > But I could not get FireFox to >work with two sites that I use in my honors general chemistry teaching > >http://www.umass.edu/molvis/freichsman/ >Or >http://bcs.whfreeman.com/biochem5/pages/bcs-main.asp?v=category&s=00020&n=99 >000&i=99020.01&o= In 1996 when Tim Maffett was developing Chime 1.0 at MDL, he created the "immediate mode button in invisible frame" ("IMBIF") method of sending javascript strings containing command scripts to Chime. He regarded this as a temporary and ugly mechanism, but it is the one that still works in all browsers! (There was a year or so about Netscape version 3.x when complicated IMBIF sites would crash it, but that stopped in later versions.) Later, Netscape implemented LiveConnect which supported the function executeScript(script) defined by Chime in Netscape 4. Unfortunately, although Netscape 7 is said to support LiveConnect (apparently needed for communication with applets such as jmol), Chime's executeScript() doesn't work in the Gecko browsers (Netscape 7, Mozilla, Firefox). Luckily, IMBIF still does. My legacy Chime sites all used IMBIF so they work in Gecko; I think Frieda Reichsman and Tim Driscoll (who develop on Macs so rarely get involved with Internet Explorer) used executeScript() in the sites you find don't work in Gecko. These would require a few tweaks to work in Gecko. The changes I needed are outlined at http://www.umass.edu/microbio/chime/beta/pe_gecko/protexpl/gecko.htm and I'll be happy to provide specifics (thanks again to Enrique Castro who first reported these fixes to me). >When I asked our IT people whether they would install FireFox, they >responded: >"No. There is no remote way of updating firefox in the event of security >vulnerabilities." That is sad to hear! What do they say about Netscape 7 or Mozilla. In my tests, they all work identically well with PE. The only distinguishing feature is that only Firefox allows you to permit popups from local html files (e.g. a downloaded PE) while blocking them from on-line sites. In the other two, you have to disable the popup blocker completely in order to use a downloaded PE. All three Geckos allow giving an on-line PE permission to open popups, while blocking other sites. -Eric ---- Eric Martz, Professor Emeritus, Dept Microbiology University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA US http://www.umass.edu/molvis/martz