Log
Netscape 8 and sIFR
First off, who beat Netscape 8 with the ugly stick? It’s the most horrendously designed application I’ve seen in a long time and it breaks so many browser UI conventions, I don’t even know where to begin ripping it to shreds. Maybe with the search box that’s placed to the left of the location box? Or with the window menu bar that’s right aligned in the title bar instead of left aligned below the title bar like it is in every other application?
Did I mention it’s Windows only? I assume this is because of the Internet Explorer mode, in which it uses IE’s rendering engine instead of Gecko. By default, it uses IE mode on a set of predefined “trusted” sites. You can turn this off in the installation process, but still…
So here’s a problem that I noticed right off the bat: When Netscape 8 is in Internet Explorer rendering mode, sIFR doesn’t work—you get an image icon and no text. Active X is disabled by default, even with a “trusted” site, and enabling it allows sIFR to work. Embedded .swfs work just fine.
It looks like sIFR will need to be disabled for Netscape 8 in IE mode. Luckily the User Agent string is different for the different rendering modes. NS8 IE mode identifies as: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Q312461) Netscape/8.0. Do we have to do browser sniffing again thanks to Netscape?
05/19/05 10:06AM Accessibility and Usability Design Flash Geekiness
Comments
That’s interesting. I wonder if it has to do with the version of Windows you’re using? Maybe NS 8 changes the security settings and allows Active X if you have XP with the security patches?
05/19/05 7:18PM
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Mike D.:
Chris,
I just tried your site out (as well as my own) in a freshly downloaded copy of Netscape 8 and sIFR works fine in both rendering modes. I wonder what’s going on…
05/19/05 6:20PM