http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010816.html has an interesting story on how Microsoft may be finding it convenient to cite the Eolas patent on Browser plugins to withdraw their support for these in IE. In another quote (http://www.macintouch.com/netscapepluginapi.html) MS is claimed to say; "ActiveX is the prefered technology for extending the functionality of WinIE, especially since Netscape itself is deprecating the old plug-in API in Netscape 6." In fact, this appears a curious spin, since the Netscape 6 instructions at http://www.mozilla.org/docs/plugin.html merely talk about extending the plugin interface, and make great play of ensuring "backward compatibility" Another aspect to note is that once you update to IE 5.5 SP2 or IE6 XP, it can be very difficult to revert to an earlier version. Even if one has an older installer, it may be quite dangerous to use it. -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (0)20 7594 5774 (Office) +44 (0870) 132-3747 (eFax) Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY, UK. http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)