How can I direct revGoURL to a specific browser?

[Bill Vlahos]

OK. I wasn't specific about all the details because it wasn't material to the question but since people keep trying to solve the wrong problem I will now say the whole story.

A company I work at has this terrible time card software program. For some inexplicable reason this web page actually opens a popup window after you authenticate. This means that the user has to turn popup blocking OFF.

The software has only been certified for IE on Windows but in our testing it actually works in Firefox and Safari too. Our users have popup blocking already turned OFF for IE. To make life easier for other browsers we recently added code to the page that tests for popup blocking.

My program is a reminder application that launches a URL to whatever the default browser is. The URL works perfectly for IE, Firefox, and Safari regardless Windows or Mac. However, we discovered that if a Windows user has IETabs installed in Firefox the URL hangs Firefox. So we were left with the dilemma of either not detecting the blocking of popups which means the user has no idea why the screen just blinks at them or hanging the browser.

I thought that if I could direct IE to open the URL for Windows, it would always work because all the users already have IE correctly not blocking popups.

Fortunately the code for testing blocking of popups was fixed so it doesn't matter any more.

However, it sounds like there isn't a good way to open a specific browser in Windows.

Bill Vlahos

On Jul 21, 2010, at 11:05 PM, Jim Ault wrote:

> You aren't specific about what does not work (menus, images, layout, javascipt, etc) but you are entering the land of cross-browser compatibility.  You are not specific about which IE version.
> 
> Very few people like the idea that a particular app (such as IE) is launched by a program.  Many would suspect phishing or other nefarious actions are taking place, much like their bad experiences with the annoying pop up window marketing tactics.
> 
> If you use JQuery or other javascipt library, you have far less worries about which browser and which version.  It would handle all versions.
> 
> Another drawback to designing for IE is that every version makes substantial changes.
> Solution:  Your web code will instruct the user's browser to download the JQuery and CSS files that you specify.  This means when IE 9 rolls out, all you need to do is update the JQuery library file on your server and you are covered for all versions of all browsers.
> 
> A very complete documentation and corrective action tutorial is on http://quirksmode.org but be warned, it is a complex subject.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> Jim Ault