Apple Responds to Dumping of QuickTime Support in Internet Explorer

Apple has acted quickly to retain QuickTime's ability to run within Internet Explorer, after Microsoft revealed that the IE 6 Public Preview and the IE 5.5 SP2 general release have dropped support for all plug-ins built to Netscape's browser plug-in specification.

Last week, Microsoft posted a Knowledge Base article on its Web site detailing the change.

QuickTime's failure caused a sense of alarm for a number of streamingmedia.com readers who upgraded IE unaware of the impact it would have on their media playing capabilities. This problem affects only Windows machines and only IE on those machines. Active-X is a Microsoft Windows technology, and thus does not exist in Max OS 9 or Mac OS X.

However, according to Microsoft's site, "This behavior is by design"; the solution is to add support for Microsoft's plug-in technology, Active-X.

Apple has posted its solution in two parts. One, at www.apple.com/quicktime, is an Active-X control for QuickTime. This is just a 140K piece of code to handle the Active-X interface to the same QuickTime code that already resides on users' machines. The other, at www.apple.com/quicktime/products, is a set of instructions and sample HTML code for webmasters who wish to make this change invisible to Windows IE visitors who haven't already installed the Active-X control.

The instructions explain that while the HTML EMBED element used for Netscape-style plug-ins will continue to work fine in IE for installed Active-X controls, IE cannot go out and download a needed Active-X control upon seeing the EMBED element; instead displaying a broken plug-in icon. To prevent this "broken plug-in" scenario for surfers who don't already have the QuickTime Active-X control installed, a Web page needs to use the HTML OBJECT element. However, the EMBED element can be placed inside the OBJECT element, so that all browsers on all platforms can access an embedded QuickTime page successfully without having to download anything beforehand.

Although Apple sees this as a simple transition, it intends to be proactive. "We're not leaving this up to chance," said Frank Casanova, Apple's director of QuickTime product marketing. "We have a variety of ways that we can reach out and touch a huge percentage of the installed QuickTime base."

When IE was first released, support for Netscape plug-ins was needed for IE to gain market share because Netscape's browser had broad plug-in support and Microsoft wanted users to be able to switch to its browser without losing capabilities. Today, however, Microsoft sees smaller demand for the technology, and many vendors, such as Macromedia with its Flash and Shockwave players, already support both browser-embedding technologies.