Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Detecting AIM from a web page

One of the engineers on my team, Greg Cypes, gave me some HTML that can be used on a web page to detect whether AIM is installed. Really simple stuff that can be easily integrated into almost any webpage. You can check it out at this link, do "View Source" to see the few lines of Javascript that do the actual detection. Unfortunately, it doesn't yet work with AIM Triton, although I am sure we will solve that before it is done.

Update: May 25, 2005 3:58 PM EDT
OK, I was wrong. The AIM detect script I posted works with IE and Netscape 4.7, but with Mozilla/Firefox, it doesn't detect AIM 5.9. Somehow the setup of the application/x-aim MIME type got busted in AIM 5.9 (maybe also in 5.5). Hopefully we can get this fixed for the AIM 5.9 refresh.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thats very neat. What are some applications of this?

Anonymous said...

doesnt work with opera (at least not with opera 8)

Anonymous said...

Any plans for Firefox/Mozilla compatability?

Anonymous said...

Should have been more clear, this detection script should work with IE and all Mozilla-based browsers, including Firefox.

Anonymous said...

Doesn't work on Firefox for me. Works on IE though.

Anonymous said...

aim 5.7 was never released lol.

Anonymous said...

doesn't work here... W/ Firefox and 5.9.3702

Anonymous said...

On the topic of bugs, it would be nice if the bug where the IM box input area height is not remember between sessions like it is in 5.5. I refuse to upgrade because of that one simple bug.

Anonymous said...

AIM 5.5 also has the same issue, I checked tonight.  Like Justin said hopefully a 5.9 refresh can be done to get this fixed.

Anonymous said...

I have fixed this in AIM 5.9.  The fix was landed on Friday and will hopefully be released in the next AIM 5.9 refresh client.  Release TBD.  This will allow people to detect an aim install from mozilla browsers.

Anonymous said...

Has there been any movement in providing this functionality for Triton? This blog is somewhat old, so I imagine there is. Also, have any cross-browser-compatible solutions been derived?