"Phillip M. Jones, C.E.T." wrote:
>
>Found out the reasons for Plugins not working on Mac. It seems that Mac
>Netscape plugins depend upon
>a technology called Liveconnect that is proprietary to Netscape. It
>seems almost all Netscape Plugins use
>Live connect. Of Course anything proprietary is Prosona Non Grata. So
>all Plugin Manufacturers will be
>required to add some additional code to use the new method. Many of the
>plugins for netscape on the
>Mac side are rather old and its unlikely some are even in business so.
>Its doubful if plugins ever work on
>the Mac side. Flash is supposed to work and Quicktime, but doesn't
>handle all the mime types out there.
>So many items on the web will not be able to be seen on Moz/N6 for Mac
>(Another thing to drive Mac User to IE.
There are quite few things that are untrue in there.
Liveconnect does indeed relate to plugins, and some work much better
with it than without it. And yes, the implementation in Netscape 6 is
indeed severely lacking (not sure it exists at all on Mac OS).
However the Flash and Quicktime plugins don't depend on LiveConnect.
Some Flash sites do indeed use it, but its *never ever* been implemented
in Mac IE 4 or 5 and thus people generally avoid it if they care about
Mac users at all.
Live Connect is implemented in IE on windows, and on Netscape 6 for
windows, at least to some level, but I think its imperfect.
Flash and Quicktime both work in Mozilla for me. Not on every page its
true, but I sincerely doubt Live Connect has much to do with that - if
it does then the page won't work in IE 5 either.
I have heard the Quicktime 5 plugin (not out yet) works much better with
Mozilla/Netscape than the Quicktime 4 plugin. You could try the
Quicktime 5 beta, but I guess it might cause you other problems (it is a
beta, after all), so its at your own risk!
AndyT
