Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Netscape's and Microsoft's software just don't get along -- and God anyone who tries to get them to make up and be nice.
Mar 24, 1998 | I wasn't asking for much. All I wanted was for my chosen e-mail program to start up whenever I clicked an e-mail address on a Web page.
That simple trick was more than my old Unix-based e-mail program, Pine, could handle. I didn't want to break up with Pine. We'd been together for five long years, and I'd grown accustomed to its interface. I don't change my ways easily -- I've still got an Olivetti portable typewriter in my basement. But, in 1998, Pine no longer met my needs. What I didn't realize, however, was that my decision to switch to a graphically based, Windows-compatible e-mail program would plunge me into a swirl of software madness.
My problem was: I wanted to use Microsoft Outlook's mail program with Netscape Navigator -- two products from companies determined not to make software coexistence peaceful. To be precise, I wanted Outlook to launch whenever I clicked an e-mail address on a Navigator Web page.
Why Outlook, you ask, and not Eudora, the most popular e-mail program in the software marketplace? Well, call me a fool, but I was interested in taking advantage of how well all the Office 97 programs work with each other. Almost against my will I was becoming a convert to "integration." Outlook encourages the use of Microsoft Word as an e-mail editor, and has some very nice features that weave together contact directories, calendar functions and mail.
But Netscape gave Outlook the cold shoulder. Netscape has its own mail program, and didn't seem to permit using a "third-party mailer." Nothing I could find in either the Outlook or Navigator help files gave any hints as to how to solve the problem. Nor did Microsoft's or Netscape's Web sites offer any assistance. Finally, after combing the Net, I found some discussion of the problem in the Usenet newsgroup alt.netscape.buggy.software. There, I learned, I could forge a shotgun software marriage between the two programs by adding a couple of lines of code to an obscure "javascript preferences" file.
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