Quote:
Originally posted by Kyle Fenton
[b]Look this is not an OS better than you are thing. This is just an article for webmasters on how this might affect them. It seems like Microsoft is monopolizing once again by getting rid of key Netscape Components, making Netscape harder to survive.
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When first reading that article, the only reference I saw to new incompatibilities was between Quicktime and Internet Explorer. Netscape is not said to have incompatibilies or removed components, however, a spokesman for Netscape is quoted as to Microsoft's reasons for the change in IE. Upon further researching, I found the tool that Apple has released to restore compatibility, as well as a description of what was changed to cause this problem.
It appears that up until Internet Explorer 5.5, IE supported plugins that were actually written for Netscape and included with the EMBED tag. I was unable to find a press release at Microsoft's web site regarding this change, but it appears that they had security issues with the EMBED tag, and therefore dropped support for it in favor of the ActiveX control's OBJECT tag that they have included with Internet Explorer since about version 3.0. Because of this change, viewer plugins that were written using the Netscape plugin format, and therefore worked because of IE including support for that format, no longer function correctly. So, Apple has released an ActiveX wrapper OCX for the QuickTime player.
Based on my own experiences, it seems that Apple was behind the times in doing this. I know that other popular plugins, such as Flash, already had an OCX format for Internet Explorer. It seems that Apple was trying to get away with only having to write one plugin that would work everywhere for as long as possible, and they have only now run out of time.
Here's that page I found...
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/produ...s/activex.html