* FH running under Crossover - Plugin Help & Advice

[gerrynuk]

Mike,

Just running through your experiments. Help & Advice seems to be OK but opens in a new window but not, apparently, a browser window. Otherwise behaves as expected.

Screen Shot 2014-06-03 at 17.46.31.png (149.71 KiB) Viewed 4323 times

[tatewise]

That is good Gerry.
It is a kind of browser window.
It is the Internet Explorer rendering engine embedded within a LUA IUP GUI window frame displaying the Help and Advice HTML pages from the FHUG Knowledge Base.
Clicking the links such as Ancestral Sources or Family Historian will take you elsewhere in the Knowledge Base and from there links can lead anywhere.

[gerrynuk]

Is there a way of telling which browser is being used? It should be Safari but the window doesn't have a toolbar or Help.

[tatewise]

As I said, it is the Internet Explorer engine, but embedded in a Plugin GUI specifically designed to provide Help & Advice pages dedicated to the Plugin, just like the Help pages dedicated to FH, and to AS, and most other applications.
The differences is that anyone (in particular the Author) can update these Plugin Help & Advice pages via the FHUG Knowledge Base without needing to update the Plugin itself.

There is no intention that it can be used as a general purpose browser. Why would you want to?

[gerrynuk]

Mike, I do remember now reading a long time ago about the difference between Internet Explorer and the Internet Explorer Engine - rather too subtle a difference for me to appreciate, I'm afraid. Presumably this is the reason that IE must be included in the Crossover Bottle, even though there is no intention to use IE itself - only the Engine.

[tatewise]

The IE engine is sometimes called the IE Shell and intended to be embedded within other applications (like the LUA IUP window) and forms the heart of the IE standard window.

One early reason for including IE was an attempt to auto-install Windows Script 5.7, but that is now done explicitly, and maybe IE is not actually needed now.
If the IE Shell is incorporated within the Windows XP default Bottle then IE can be omitted.

BUT some Plugins, such as Lookup Missing Census Facts, need a standalone browser to open HTML files, and if this has to be IE then it must be retained. As you know, this feature is currently being investigated in FH and Crossover - Lookup Missing Census Facts plugin (11249).