“Microsoft HTML Viewer” plugin – for Internet Explorer?

There used to be a time when everything tech wasn’t so “meta”, and things (mostly) worked in the way they were designed.

Whilst browsing the web just now using Internet Explorer 7 (normally I use Firefox 2), I get the following request for an ActiveX control to be installed:

This website wants to run the following add-on: ‘Microsoft HTML Viewer’ from ‘Microsoft Corporation’

(Click pic to enlarge)

HTML viewer plug-in… for a Web browser!? Well I guess now we can put both HTML and Flash in the same box as “plug-in” based technologies hey (just kidding) Is this done on purpose to make IE look bad, or is it just plain insanity? I’m going to give a Mac and OSX a trial within a couple of months (been thinking about this for some time), coming from using Amiga which had a great OS, I prefer to be in more control of what I work on.

I particularly like the contrast of the subject matter displayed in the browser.

John Dowdell

Posted: January 9, 2007

The rendering engine behind MSIE is indeed packaged as an ActiveX Control, and can be invoked by other applications on the system. (ie, such a thing *does* exist! ;-)

I'm not sure why you'd see that alert on that page, however. I visited that same page in FF1.5x/WinXP and it couldn't play the video, said it required a QT component which wasn't available from the QuickTime servers. Maybe it's the error messages themselves which are in error...?

jd

Rich

Posted: January 9, 2007

Thanks for dropping by JD. I'm sure there was a perfectly valid reason for seeing it, I just found it quite funny, especially as that is the very ActiveX control that IE uses for rendering HTML anyway.

JesterXL

Posted: January 9, 2007

Didn't get the error in Firefox 1.5, but did get it in IE7. Was using IE7 to go look at the .mov's in the browser cache (since they are encrypted in Firefox) and see if they had a Flash track (as opposed to the .mov's really being digital video).

Said I didn't have Quicktime. Download and run; "Already have latest version installed, can't continue installer." Huh?

Run IE7 again. I remember that sometimes you can click the yellow bar up top to "make things run". Did so. Page refreshes.

Alert again... this time, though, it says Quicktime, not the HTML viewer. That time it ran.

...bloody...hell... IE blows.

Matthew Warneford

Posted: January 9, 2007

Rich, I switched to Mac when the intel Mac Book Pros launched. I love it, we now have half the office on macs... some have even bought them for home use. Go for it - every day Im happier in every way because I use mac. We'll, nearly!

Rich

Posted: January 9, 2007

Jesse, you had an even more fun experience than me!

Matt, so good to hear from you it's been years! I think it's a done deal really, I just need to make sure I have all bases covered. If Vista runs with hardware support through a future version of bootcamp, parallels, coherence et al I have even less to worry about. Well it's that or switch to using an Atari ST...winner.

Tim Hodges

Posted: January 9, 2007

Rich,

I swear if you don't switch to a mac I will come round and beat you death with my ibook! But in all seriousness whilist working with Flash, Dreamweaver, etc at University we always used macs. I found them to be stable, easy to use, damn quick and...I don't know Dreamweaver certainly seemed to feel a better product on the Mac compared to the clunky feeling PC version I know use. It may just be Mac tinted glasses but I'd like to recommend that you go for it buddy.

Richard Leggett