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?

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/

Answer 2

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.