Recently Bryan Van Vliet wrote, ( Re: Plug-ins for Internet Explorer 3.0)

- Apparently, Microsoft's committment to plug-in support is less than encouraging. This is distressing for us, not because it would be hard to take our Chime plug-in and wrap it as an ActiveX control, rather:

- Sites would need 2 sets of documents, one supporting the EMBED (plug-in) command and one supporting the OBJECT (ActiveX) command.

- Sites would likely support two types of scripting, JavaScript and VBScript (JScript is too buggy and incomplete to use and most OLE/ ActiveX programmers would probably feel more comfortable in Visual Basic.)

and

- Microsoft, in the 3 years we have been developing OLE controls, has never successfully ported OLE to the Macintosh (it performs so slowly it is unusable.) It is unlikely that ActiveX will become a cross- platform standard,

You might as well get ready for more of the same. This is going to be a prime business strategy for Microsoft in its competition with Netscape for dominance in the browser market. Based on past history, Microsoft will start out following the "open" standards, then start adding proprietary "improvements" which will have the effect of distinguishing between browsers, and use its dominant market position to gradually suck market share away from the competition. Once that happens, Microsoft will have locked up another segment of the market, and we will have to get by with what they decide to provide for us. Evidently it is hard for users to resist the temptation of "free candy" as Ross Perot would say, as more and more users try the free Internet Explorer browser, which just by coincidence happens to have the same version number as the current Netscape Navigator release. You can see the train coming, folks. Are you going to get out of the way, or just get run over? (I'm only moderately paranoid about Microsoft.) =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= Dr. Timothy L. Pickering, Assistant Director NSF Center for Polymeric Adhesives and Composites Virginia Tech 201A Hancock Hall Blacksburg, VA 24061-0257 Tel. (540) 231-4443, FAX: (540) 231-9452 E-Mail: timp@vt.edu URL http://www.vt.edu:10021/research/stc/STC.Home.Page.html =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)