All entries for Wednesday 27 October 2004

Firefox and plugins

I've just spent a very long time trying to get EPICentre (which we use for managing the campus data network infrastructure) working as a Java applet in Firefox 1.0 PR on my laptop.

Basically, the EPICentre page requires a JRE 1.3.1 plugin installed in order to load the applet. I didn't know this, and Firefox kept on installing the latest JRE 1.5 plugin, which didn't work. So it kept on telling me that "Additional plugins are required to display all the media on this page".

In the end, thinking it was a problem with Firefox, I gave up and reverted to using IE, which also didn't work with the JRE 1.5 plugin installed. It did, however, prompt me to install JRE 1.3.1, after which the applet worked in both IE and Firefox (having told the JRE installation wizard that I wanted to use the plugin in Netscape 6, which I guess it thought Firefox was).

My second brush today with plugins in Firefox was with Quicktime, which also failed to work. It just keeps on telling me that I need to install the plugin, even though I already have done about ten times now. Each time I do so it tells me that it's installed the plugin successfully, but then it still can't display the content when it reloads the page.

The one plugin that did work straight away was the Flash player, which installed straight away into Firefox and displayed the movie straight away after reloading the page. However, this is the only Firefox plugin that I've so far managed to successfully install using the clever XPI stuff.

So it seems that Firefox still has a long way to go with it's plugin technology if it's to rival IE. As much of a fan of Firefox that I am, it really leaves you unable to rely upon it as your primary browser if you can't get the plugin working for a site that you need to use regularly.

I'll also add that all of this was done in Windows. I haven't even attempted installing plugins in my Linux installation yet, and I'm not looking forward to doing it at all.

: 27 Oct 2004 18:13 |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem