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A website's active content runs fine in IE8 but not in Firefox 29.

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  • 2 have this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

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I'm accessing a website with active content, http://www.chezmaya.com/applet/squelette.htm . In IE8 it plays music and displays a dancing figure that can be dragged around with the mouse pointer. In Firefox 29.0.1, on the same machine, it displays the background picture, and an animated gif shows a little action. But the music and the interactive dancing figure are missing. In IE8 I do not have this URL in any kind of trusted sites list, so apparently it works by default.

Just in case it has anything to do with Java, note that I installed the latest version of Java in the past few days for unrelated reasons, and it seems to be working just fine.

I'm accessing a website with active content, http://www.chezmaya.com/applet/squelette.htm . In IE8 it plays music and displays a dancing figure that can be dragged around with the mouse pointer. In Firefox 29.0.1, on the same machine, it displays the background picture, and an animated gif shows a little action. But the music and the interactive dancing figure are missing. In IE8 I do not have this URL in any kind of trusted sites list, so apparently it works by default. Just in case it has anything to do with Java, note that I installed the latest version of Java in the past few days for unrelated reasons, and it seems to be working just fine.

Chosen solution

That page was coded for Internet Explorer and uses nonstandard features such as the window.event object. In a way, it's understandable: when the script in the page was written in August 2004, Firefox was at version 0.9.3 and IE had a market share of 90% or higher.

I'm sure you can find many great pages whose authors have never updated them to work in other browsers. It's unfortunate, but most people still do have IE, so...

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That page uses BGSOUND to play a midi file and that only works in IE and not in Firefox.

<BGSOUND src="tocata.mid" loop=infinite>

You can try this bookmarklet to see if that makes the music play via the Windows Media Player. Note that you can also run this script via the command line of the Web Console (Firefox/Tools > Web Developer).


javascript:(function(){function R(w){try{var D=w.document,e=D.getElementsByTagName('bgsound'),B,M,i;for(i=0;E=e[i];i++){M=D.createElement('embed');M.setAttribute('src',E.getAttribute('src'));M.setAttribute('type','application/x-mplayer2');M.setAttribute('height','50');M.setAttribute('width','200');B=D.body;B.firstChild.parentNode.insertBefore(M,B.firstChild);}}catch(e){}}R(self);var i,x;for(i=0;x=frames[i];++i)R(x);})();

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Running the script from the web console did cause the site's music to play, but did not restore the missing video animation.

In any event, this kind of approach won't resolve my problem. If I should share that site's URL with anyone else, and if they are using Firefox, they won't be able to display the site properly either.

It seems that the more appropriate answer is that Firefox does not have the capability, perhaps even with extensions, to render this site, or other sites that may work okay in IE. That would be disappointing, but if that's the case then it is the correct answer.

It would be appropriate for the Firefox developers to add the missing audio and video capabilities as standard features.

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Chosen Solution

That page was coded for Internet Explorer and uses nonstandard features such as the window.event object. In a way, it's understandable: when the script in the page was written in August 2004, Firefox was at version 0.9.3 and IE had a market share of 90% or higher.

I'm sure you can find many great pages whose authors have never updated them to work in other browsers. It's unfortunate, but most people still do have IE, so...

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Code like this that use MS features will only work in IE and never in other browsers.

o.style.filter = "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.matrix(FilterType=nearest, sizingMethod=\"auto expand\") alpha(opacity=30)"

That JavaScript code is a bit of a nightmare with all semicolons missing to terminate a statement.