Can I force a link to open in a specific browser?

Question

I have designed a website using Firefox and am now looking to integrate a softphone into the webpage, but unfortunately it is made with ActiveX, so Firefox won't support it.

I have tried opening my page in IE9, and it looks a mess because I've used CSS3 for a lot of it and haven't coded it for different browsers because we will only be using Firefox within the office.

Is there a way that I can tell my page in Firefox to specifically open a new page in Internet Explorer and just have the softphone in there? Or is there a way to get ActiveX running in Firefox with a plugin or something?

Indisposition

Just a suggestion, you really should make your website functional on all browsers. – Phrensy

No, you can't let Firefox open another browser (even not another program): imagine the security risks that such possibilities would imply. BTW, just spotted another alot. – Dodecanese

Lots of people don't even have Internet Explorer installed. And lots of those that do aren't going to agree to the Click OK to allow ActiveX control access to anything on your PC and then also agree to the follow up Are you sure you want to do this dangerous thing? dialog. – Unnatural

Making it functional across other browsers is something for the future, but for now its not important for us. This isnt a webpage that is going to be available to the public, just a few people in an office – Indisposition

Answer 1

I don't think you can open a IE window from firefox, but you can easily build a firefox plugin based on your activex using http://code.google.com/p/ff-activex-host/

Izaguirre

I'd be amazed if that wasn't a Windows-only plugin. – Unnatural

activex is windows only... to make it cross platform he would have to rewrite the whole activex component – Izaguirre

uhm... Good as an answer but very bad as an idea – Vagary

Answer 2

You can open a link in Microsoft Edge from any browser by adding microsoft-edge: in front of the url in the HREF.

<a href="microsoft-edge:http://www.google.com">EDGE (works)</a>

I don't know how to get it to work in other browsers though. My team and I spent quite a bit of time on it and couldn't find a raw HTML/JavaScript solution.

Payload

For me, the link won't open if I'm already on Edge. Is that a normal behavior? – Shirberg

I can confirm that the link doesn't open for me in Edge as of right now. That's pretty unexpected for me. Let us know if you come up with a solution. I assume an update change something, since it would have been an unacceptable solution for me at the time I was looking at this. – Payload

At the moment, I've checked several articles and I do not find any solid solution. My workaround for the moment will be to add a function to check the browser at the launch of my application. – Shirberg

It also does not open coming from Chrome – Geiger

@Geiger Try right-clicking and clicking "Open Link in a new Tab" - it will prompt you to open Edge. With that said, this is not a solution that can be used in prod. – Payload

Answer 3

It really depends on your exact situation.

If you are targeting multiple users outside a corporate network this is hardly possible to achieve. However, if you are targeting your company's network it's possible to do this using custom protocol.

Your link then would look like: ie://opens_in_ie.com

You'll have to make changes to registry of target computers though. More info about custom protocols is available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa767914%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

In most cases, system administrator can do this remotely.

Paella

Answer 4

IETab V2 will let you open a tab within Firefox that runs the IE engine.

Once installed, you can force a link to open with IE by formatting the URL or bookmark like this:

chrome://ietab2/content/reloaded.html?url=http://domain.com

Scooter

Answer 5

It's somewhat specific, but I created an internal site at work, and I wanted to link to another internal site that only works in IE. To do this, I created/defined my own application protocol in the registry. Then I added to my links the protocol header. This is similar to what apple does when you click a link and it opens iTunes. The downside to this approach, however, is that users will have to install the registry modification for it to work... like I said, it's really a solution for a very specific scenario.

Howerton

Answer 6

Including double quotation marks around both program location and webpage name will do the trick:

"file location.exe"<space>"webpage"

Alyshaalysia

The question is about making Firefox open the link in Internet Explorer. It isn't about the Windows command line – Unnatural

Answer 7

Same answer as from chuck wallace

If you want to start from for example in Internet Explorer, go to C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe and create a shortcut to the Desktop. When you check the properties from this created shortcut, you will see the Target: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe.

Now you can place the shortcut from the website, behind the Target. It will show something like this: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe www.nu.nl. Or this C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe https://stackoverflow.com. This way it opens IE first and then the website.

Sulphurbottom