Hello, I have had major difficulty replacing an Internet Explorer control built-into Windows 7, It seems they are have used a proprietary IE interface that prevents this Control from being replaced with Firefox...Windows 7 Includes a new Feature called Federated OpenSearch based on the OpenSearch standards (http://www.opensearch.org/ Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1) It allows a user to search a remote database (like Youtube) that returns XML results based on OpenSearch and display these results as files on the local system in Explorer.
Heres a screenshot: http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/5899/win7opensearchexample.jpg This is a very useful feature, however the Preview Plane showing a preview of the Search Result (seen on the right hand side of the screenshot) uses a modified Internet Explorer ActiveX Control to show the Preview... This IE control loads website previews using the Restricted Zone security level settings used by IE and is severely limited at what content webpages are able to display (like Flash and pdf)... I set about replacing this control with a Firefox Preview Handler I created using xulrunner and the MSDN Preview Handler framework (thats freely available) and immediately run into two major issues preventing me and anyone else from replacing this IE control and I believe this is in Breach of Anti-Trust legislation and prevents Fair-use by alternate browsers. The first main issue is the two CLSID registry keys are Protected by TrustedInstaller making them unmodifiable without manually changing security settings and values, that requires quite some effort and is not easy todo at all. The second main issue and the biggest issue here is even after replacing the IE control with the Firefox Preview Handler engine, explorer uses a propriety undisclosed interface to share the URL with the OpenSearch preview handler... Heres a screenshot loading the preview plane using Firefox: http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/7889/badurl.jpg As you can see its showing an Internet Explorer temporary directory instead of the webpage as you would expect, It should be providing a URL like it does with the default IE control that makes it usable by alternate browsers like Firefox....I find that single problem to be in breach of the Fair-Use act and in breach of Anti-Trust legislation. I am able to replace the default IE control that Win7 uses with the IE ActiveX control provided by the.Net framework and Visual Studio and make it load pages using the WebBrowser.DocumentStream namespace included with the the.Net framework... however...even that IE control has issues loading pages properly... I believe Microsoft is once again Illigally tieing IE to the OS using methods that restrict competition and Fair-Use. I can provide Source-Code, Reproduction steps and numerous examples to demonstrate this illegal behavior... I would like someone to contact me about this issue and confirm this before taking this complaint to the US and EU... My work e-mail address is dmex [ at ] vistax64.com and I would be happy to provide anyone with these examples, source-code and steps to reproduce the findings of my tests. Sincerely Steven G _______________________________________________ legal mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/legal
