Detecting Plugins in Internet Explorer
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You want visitors to your website to view its media in the way intended. If you website is particularly media rich, you will want them to be able to check whether they have the appropriate plug-ins installed in their browsers. Internet Explorer, still the browser of choice for most Internet users, makes this task a little difficult -- but with some VBScript code, you can put together a basic Web page that gets the job done.
With so many media rich technologies in use on the Internet today, a designer’s hardest task can often be deciding which of these technologies to use. Do you present your text as plain text on the page, in a PDF format perhaps, or something proprietary such as Microsoft Word? Do you present your graphics as flat pictures, animated GIFs or super smooth Flash movies?
The answers, no doubt, will depend on many things, including the resources you have at hand, the time frame you are working to, and most importantly, your target audience. Additionally, your site will probably have any, all or a combination of presentation media present. Deciding to invest time, effort and money into a presentation solution such as Flash will undoubtedly improve the appearance of any website -- for those people lucky enough to have an appropriate viewer, and this is something that many Internet users wouldn't know. For example, my old man is on the Internet almost as much as I am, but if I asked him which version of Flash he had, he'd probably think I was alluding to the original black and white films or the 1980's cult classic.
As for knowing which version of the player people have installed, forget it! Even in a completely controlled, managed desktop environment, it is sometimes hard to tell which version of a specific plug-in people will have in their browsers when accessing say, the company intranet.
A mechanism is needed to address this issue and there are two common ways of approaching it. You can implement a script on the page containing the flash movie, or real clip or whatever media, that tests the browser for which plug-ins are installed and then either plays the active multimedia content if the appropriate plug-in is available or redirects the visitor to a page where the plug-in can be downloaded if it is not present. Or you can simply have a page separate from the page that makes use of the plug-ins, which tests the browser and outputs a report advising which plug-ins are available and whether any action needs to be taken prior to accessing the pages containing the active content.
Both options have their good and bad points. The first option is more helpful, automatically taking the appropriate action based upon the needs of the visitor; however, this would possibly interrupt the logical flow of the user's browsing experience, taking them to an external site that they may not wish to visit. The second example, while informative, does nothing to counter the problem if the user does not have the object required. Nevertheless, some kind of solution needs to be introduced if you want to run media rich files on your website, and some kind of test will need to be performed on visitors' browsers to advise them if they do not have the plug-in needed.
Next: How Navigator Handles the Problem >>
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