This has been on the cards for some time. The plugin user interface long since vanished from IE, and it was only a matter of time before support did as well. This of course has impact on other chemistry sites that make use of plugins such as the chemweb one (e.g. on the new organic syntheses site, http://www.orgsyn.org/ ), the excellent SVG plugin from Adobe (see eg http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/svg/ ), the chemical editing plugins for ISI (eg on the WoS site) etc etc. I should imagine that those site that use eg. JME (Java based) will be OK. Sites like Eric Martz' (Protein Explorer) which contain some 50,000 lines of Rasmol scripting for Chime must be hoping that AOL do not kill Netscape off (apparently, they will use IE for their latest AOL browser). I presume there are a few sites that use ActiveX that will be smiling though (does anyone know of good examples?) We perhaps could pin our hopes on using the excellent support for XML in IE (6, which in its current release does still support plugins, but only just), but would need also for the rendering something like Java (which MS are not too keen on, having tried to kill it on several occasions), JavaScript (which MS are not too keen on, preferring VBScript; not sure they fully support ECMAScript) or eg SVG (which Microsoft are not too keen on, preferring VML) . I would also note that iCab for Mac has near flawless support for plugins, and is a browser that strives to uphold standards as well. I cannot remember if the latest versions of Opera work properly with Chime. I do notice that the latest Netscape 6.1 DOES now work with Chime, on both Windows AND Mac. An excellent example of how things could be in a plugless browser world is Croczilla (http://www.croczilla.com/svg). It supports not only the HTML DOM (a DOM is an in memory abstraction of the content from a markup language) but also the MathML and SVG (partially) DOMs. It can support chemistry via a clever "binding" using CSS and XBL (XML binding language) between e.g. CML and SVG. This approach however is not going to fix all those countless sites that are designed around plugin use, and eg mapping a Rasmol script to a JavaScript "event" is going to be tough!
MDL has learned that a new service pack of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser (5.5 SP2) has been released today without support for the Netscape plug-in interface used by Chime and Chime Pro. Our understanding is that future versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer will also lack this interface. This would mean that the Chime and Chime Pro plug-ins would not be supported on these new versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer (including 6.0) until further notice. This issue does not affect the Netscape Communicator 4.7 browser.
-- Henry Rzepa. Imperial College, Chemistry Dept. +44 020 7594 5774 (Office) +44 020 7594 5804 (Fax) 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)