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I have designed a website using Firefox and am now looking to integrate a softphone into the webpage, but unfortunately it is made with ActiveX, so Firefox won't support it.

I have tried opening my page in IE9, and it looks a mess because I've used CSS3 for a lot of it and haven't coded it for different browsers because we will only be using Firefox within the office.

Is there a way that I can tell my page in Firefox to specifically open a new page in Internet Explorer and just have the softphone in there? Or is there a way to get ActiveX running in Firefox with a plugin or something?

TylerH
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Daniel H
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    Just a suggestion, you really should make your website functional on all browsers. – JohnP May 04 '11 at 09:38
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    No, you can't let Firefox open another browser (even not another program): imagine the security risks that such possibilities would imply. BTW, just spotted another [alot](http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html). – Marcel Korpel May 04 '11 at 09:38
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    Lots of people don't even have Internet Explorer installed. And lots of those that do aren't going to agree to the *Click OK to allow ActiveX control access to anything on your PC* and then also agree to the follow up *Are you sure you want to do this dangerous thing?* dialog. – Quentin May 04 '11 at 09:40
  • Making it functional across other browsers is something for the future, but for now its not important for us. This isnt a webpage that is going to be available to the public, just a few people in an office – Daniel H May 04 '11 at 09:43

7 Answers7

7

It really depends on your exact situation.

If you are targeting multiple users outside a corporate network this is hardly possible to achieve. However, if you are targeting your company's network it's possible to do this using custom protocol.

Your link then would look like: ie://opens_in_ie.com

You'll have to make changes to registry of target computers though. More info about custom protocols is available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa767914%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

In most cases, system administrator can do this remotely.

Igor
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IETab V2 will let you open a tab within Firefox that runs the IE engine.

Once installed, you can force a link to open with IE by formatting the URL or bookmark like this:

chrome://ietab2/content/reloaded.html?url=http://domain.com
Tony
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7

I don't think you can open a IE window from firefox, but you can easily build a firefox plugin based on your activex using http://code.google.com/p/ff-activex-host/

ariel
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It's somewhat specific, but I created an internal site at work, and I wanted to link to another internal site that only works in IE. To do this, I created/defined my own application protocol in the registry. Then I added to my links the protocol header. This is similar to what apple does when you click a link and it opens iTunes. The downside to this approach, however, is that users will have to install the registry modification for it to work... like I said, it's really a solution for a very specific scenario.

jake_nerdnest
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5

You can open a link in Microsoft Edge from any browser by adding microsoft-edge: in front of the url in the HREF.

<a href="microsoft-edge:http://www.google.com">EDGE (works)</a>

I don't know how to get it to work in other browsers though. My team and I spent quite a bit of time on it and couldn't find a raw HTML/JavaScript solution.

VSO
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Same answer as from chuck wallace

If you want to start from for example in Internet Explorer, go to C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe and create a shortcut to the Desktop. When you check the properties from this created shortcut, you will see the Target: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe.

Now you can place the shortcut from the website, behind the Target. It will show something like this: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe www.nu.nl. Or this C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe https://stackoverflow.com. This way it opens IE first and then the website.

Salahuddin Ahmed
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Flip van Ipscheuten
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Start a new shortcut: Target:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" https://news.sky.com/ Simple works on all browsers, Ia'm trs-80 old school ?chr$(24) :)

chuck wallace
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