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From: Jeff on 19 May 2010 19:49

I'm pretty sure the answer will be "no," but I'll ask anyway. I'm new to
this so please bare with me if I don't use great terminology.

I have a Web based application written in Visual Studio.net 2005 using
visual basic.

It works well in newer versions of IE, but is problematic with Firefox and
some of the other browsers.

I already have working code that will detect the client's browser in use and
if it's not IE, will take the client machine to a page that explains that
the app won't work well unless they use IE. It will be visited, however, by
people who are not very computer literate, so I want to make things as easy
as possible for them.

So,
I'm wondering whether there is any way of placing any type of code on my
page that could permit a button click on my web page to open IE on the
client's computer (perhaps with the client machine user's permission or
similar). One of the reasons for doing this is that the original link for my
page has an embedded query string that I could then transfer over to IE from
the original browser, but that query string will be lost if the user of the
client machine simply opens IE on their own through the program menu.

If that's impossible, I'm wondering whether there is some other way to
transfer information from one web browser to another (IE) other than to
simply display that info on the web page and have the user manually enter it
in a text box on the second (IE) browser, or copy the original link into the
new browser.

....hope this question makes sense.

Thanks in advance

Jeff




From: Andrew Morton on 20 May 2010 03:59
Jeff wrote:
> I'm pretty sure the answer will be "no," but I'll ask anyway. I'm new
> to this so please bare with me if I don't use great terminology.
>
> I have a Web based application written in Visual Studio.net 2005 using
> visual basic.
>
> It works well in newer versions of IE, but is problematic with
> Firefox and some of the other browsers.
>
> I already have working code that will detect the client's browser in
> use and if it's not IE, will take the client machine to a page that
> explains that the app won't work well unless they use IE. It will be
> visited, however, by people who are not very computer literate, so I
> want to make things as easy as possible for them.

Presumably it's the CSS which isn't working.

One way is to develop it to work correctly with Firefox and Opera, and
there's a very good chance it will then work correctly with IE8. Then use a
conditional comment to use different CSS for IE.

"About Conditional Comments":
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537512%28VS.85%29.aspx

Also, later versions of VS could well produce HTML which works better for
all browsers.

Your approach won't work very well for people using Mac OS X or Linux
because IE is not available on those platforms.

--
Andrew


From: Phill W. on 20 May 2010 07:56
On 20/05/2010 00:49, Jeff wrote:

> I have a Web based application written in Visual Studio.net 2005 using
> visual basic. It works well in newer versions of IE, but is problematic
> with Firefox and some of the other browsers.
OK, I appreciate that you're new and that this /is/ going to sound a bit
rough but ...

You need to fix your application so that it /does/ work with other
browsers. Going back a decode or so (when I started web development) it
used to be the case that getting your application to work in Firefox (or
Netscape navigator, back then) was a better "starting point" because
then it would almost certainly work in IE. The other way around; not so
reliable, as you've discovered.

> I already have working code that will detect the client's browser in use and
> if it's not IE, will take the client machine to a page that explains that
> the app won't work well unless they use IE.
Oh goody; you're arcing back to the Bad Old Days where almost every web
page had a big message on it saying: "Best viewed in 'X'!" or "This page
requires 'Y'!" and wouldn't work (at all, in some cases) in anything else.

> It will be visited, however, by people who are not very computer
> literate, so I want to make things as easy as possible for them.
So make it work in /their/ browser, then they don't have to do anything.

> I'm wondering whether there is any way of placing any type of code on my
> page that could permit a button click on my web page to open IE on the
> client's computer (perhaps with the client machine user's permission or
> similar).
And what if they're /not/ using a Windows PC?
Try getting, say, Opera to Shell out "iexplore.exe" on their Linux box
and see how far you get. :-)

> If that's impossible, I'm wondering whether there is some other way to
> transfer information from one web browser to another (IE) other than to
> simply display that info on the web page and have the user manually enter it
> in a text box on the second (IE) browser, or copy the original link into the
> new browser.
This is getting harder and harder with each iteration of Windows.
By default, IE actually runs in a security sandbox with a /lower/ level
of privilege than the surrounding user session and Vista/Win7 are
getting very picky about sending anything across these security
boundaries. You could put a lot of effort into getting this working
this only to find the user gets slapped in the face with the dreaded UAC
dialog when they try to use it. (That's Bad, BTW).

Some Firefox users do install the IETab add-on that allows you to chop
and change between rendering engines in just this way but, again, other
browsers may not have this feature.

In short, there is no way to do what you're asking that will work for
everyone, everywhere. Instead, use your existing browser-detection code
to modify your html, etc., so that it does work anywhere.

Welcome to the Wibbly-Wobbly Web.

Regards,
Phill W.
From: Jeff on 21 May 2010 02:47

"Phill W." <p-.-a-.-w-a-r-d-@-o-p-e-n-.-a-c-.-u-k> wrote in message
news:ht380t$o6p$1(a)south.jnrs.ja.net...

> And what if they're /not/ using a Windows PC?
> Try getting, say, Opera to Shell out "iexplore.exe" on their Linux box and
> see how far you get. :-)
> Regards,
> Phill W.

Thanks Phill and Andrew. I'll attempt to take your advice about making it
work.
It would probably be easier than writting something like,
"response.redirect (newegg.buy.a.real.windows.computer.with.IE.on.sale.exe.)
"

after a few hours, I figured out how to get my site to work in Firefox.

I don't understand why, but when I specified a variable as a string a modal
dialog box refused to retrieve or save to a database. When it was left
unspecified, it worked. Found this completely through trial and error by
removing one line of code at a time until things worked. ...can't see why it
would matter, but it did.

....that and apparently java script won't close a new brower window that java
didn't open in Firefox. ...so I just removed the close button if the browser
wasn't IE.



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