detect plugin

[Tails]

How can you search whether a user has a certain plugin? I have seen such a page try to get the version of flash installed and I don't know how it worked. When I try the commands in the source like if (navigator.plugins) and if (navigator.mimeTypes), they never return as anything. And navigator.plugins.length is always 0. What's this mean? What browsers support this? Apparently not IE 5.0 if I have done everything correct. And then more importantly, how do you know what the plugin is called? I want to check if a user has the ZDspc plugin. I think it has a mime of something like audio/x-zdspcmusic or something like that but which of these (or what else) is supposed to come up when searched for in a script?

[jalarie]

From what I've seen, IE (all versions) supports these items only to the point of not blowing up; it return null/zero. Netscape 4.x and 7.x, Opera, and Mozilla users may visit the "Tables > User Information > Plugins & Mime Types" page at my site to see what is on their machines. You're also welcome to view the code while you're there:

 http://spruce.flint.umich.edu/~jalarie/

[Tails]

I don't quite understand what you mean by blowing up with it. How far do I have to go? BTW, your 16 puzzle looks very similar to my sliding puzzles at http://XFox_Prower.tripod.com/games/js
But your code is probably cleaner since you are dealing with pure numbers and not external images. I have to identify them by fileSize to tell them apart. Good thing they are not BMP. Good thing I don't use Windows 2000 since it's Paint cannot save as GIF like Windows 98 can too!

[jalarie]

Blowing up, as I used it, means causing an error because of being undefined. IE defines the items but puts nothing in there. The other browsers give you all sorts of interesting information, as displayed by my page referenced above.

I'm using Windows 2000 and just tried it's Paint. It warns about posible loss of color detail, but saves as GIF quite well.

[glenngv]

try this plugin detector I found.

[jalarie]

glenngv: Interesting, but it only detects eight specific plugins. The browsers other than IE make the complete list available so that you can search for whatever you want. In my opinion, Microsoft fell flat on their faces on this one.

[Tails]

I have not yet tried this script yet, but can I add more plugins for it? I don't know where you get the info in the lines like
detectIE("Adobe.SVGCtl","SVG Viewer")
Is that the exact name of the plugin file? And for the 2nd variable, I guess I have to guess at that since there is no documentation on this plugin I am trying to use. It is the zdspc plugin at zdspc.zophar.net. Normally I use Winamp to play them but I would like to use it on the web as conveniently as possible.
What I mean by that is I don't want a message popping up every page change if they don't have the plugin. But also a question is how does comet cursor get their own popup dialog asking if you want to install their plugin? And is there a way to click in a created dialog like that a "don't ask me again" button with cookie use?

[Tails]

Huh? W2k can save as GIF? It couldn't on the machine I used. It was Professional by the way. Why are so many different machines variable on what they have? If I were to upgrade, I would want everything I pay for, not a few random surprises from a goodie bag. But really, this is what it looks like to me.

[Tails]

Here is the site for the ZDspc player and a sample page to test it's plugin. http://zdspc.zophar.net and http://zdspc.zophar.net/zdspcsample.html (I think). I've tried everything to try to get IE to detect it as a plugin. I'm about to make a for loop to increment and test for 32-bit strings in all known so called ways of finding plugins by strings and return all results (leave my computer on for about 6 months straight...) It's rediculous. What am I supposed to do? I heard that VBScript can search for registry strings. Is that true? That's all I need to learn to get out of this mess.

[boggly]

I ran into a problem similar to this before. As someone already said IE doesn't support the mimeTypes or plugins arrays, so you won't be able access browser support that way. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an easy answer for this type of thing (as far as I know anyways) so you'll either have to turn to VBScript or some other Micro$oft proprietary technology, forget IE, or drop the plugin altogether.

--boggly

[Tails]

Easy way or not, as I asked above, if VBScript can search for registery strings and return a true or false, then I know where that registry string is. I just need to know how to get VBScript to do that. A quick explanation or link would be very helpful, thanks.