Battling with Active X – or IEsicks

I'm having a minor spat with a website I need to use for work. It's a national portal and I'm required to upload data to it. Irritatingly, the site is packed with Active X commands. More irritatingly, the only browser I'm allowed on my work PC is a tightly locked-down version of IE6.

To get to the rub… the site I'm accessing has a useful set of FAQs. Great, I thought. Zoom off to get them… click …click…. arghhhh. All I get is one of those little boxes which tells me nothing will download. No warning. Zilch. Kaput.

Well the first time this happened I plugged in my 'Opera on a Stick' (I travel prepared). Sure enough, four clicks in to the site and the FAQs appeared. Godamm… it's simply a downloadable Word file. :faint: Great. I put in a complaint to the site anyway, but no response other than they'll look into it.

💡 Tried to access it from home tonight. The site works in: Netscape 4.73, Opera 7.54/7.6, FF 1.0. It even works in IE6 (but bizarrely asks me to install an Active X control).

What I can't figure out is why on earth anyone (let alone a government IT contractor) would use an Active X control to load up a basic web-link to a Word document. What's even more ridiculous is that apart from a slightly fancier interface, you don't even need the Active X to get the file. Opera/FF can get to it fine. Actually there are Active X controls all over the site, and yet not a single page fails on Opera.

Meanwhile, I'm still relying on my portable Opera to get my job done, and am canvassing our tech department to give me anything but IE. I'd love to have Opera installed, but the leading candidate is FF (and there's even resistance to that since we're a 'one platform' type of place).

Oh and I just did a quick page validation (we're talking about a page with standard site menu and four links to Word files). It came up with 467 errors!

This Post Has 6 Comments

  1. eztigma

    10 Dec 2004

    How do I put Opera in a stick??? 🙂

  2. mjmsprt40

    10 Dec 2004

    That's government for you. Make a simple job several times harder than it needs to be, and write in a bunch of errors to boot.

    I'm just surprised you don't need to fill out 14 forms in quadruplicate to get to that Word page.

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