Why Protonotes requires Microsoft Internet Explorer

  • Don't hate the player, hate the game

    Take a deep breath, put down your torches, and hear us out. We get lots of questions about Protonotes' browser support. In our case, it wasn't just a simple question of which browsers to support.

    When the Protonotes concept was first conceived, it was planned to be a web service that was accessible in any browser. But within a few hours, the harsh reality of the browser security model (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533028.aspx) set in. Every note that you create in Protonotes has to be attached to a web page - it has a URL assigned to it. But because of browser security, a web page's URL cannot be read. To read a web page's URL, we had a few main options:

  • 1) Develop plugins for the major browsers. All users would have to install the plugin. So if your project team had 20 team members, you'd have to get all of them to install the plugin - and hope that browser plugins are allowed in their corporate environment.

  • 2) Make it work in all browsers but users would have to manually enter the URL for every web page they wanted to annotate. You could not browse the web contextually and then annotate.

  • 3) Make it work in all browsers, but users would have to install a bookmarklet and access the bookmarklet every time they wanted to add a note.

  • 4) Give a single html file that the team leader could drop in their server. Annotation would work in all browsers, but only on web pages that are served up on the same server.

  • 5) Use an .hta (html application, HTA). Requires Microsoft Internet Explorer to be installed, but users do not have to install plugins, no server installation required, users can browse the web and annotate directly all through one single link. You can read all about HTAs at Microsoft's website.

  • The overarching goal is to offer a solution that has the least friction of adoption for project teams involved in web design/development (teams that include project managers, users, business analysts, developers, designers, etc.). Option #5, the HTA solution, wins. Is it perfect? No. Is it the best solution available considering all existing limitiations? Yes.

  • There are other annotation web services out there that are geared for individual use (as opposed to teams). In those instances, I can see how you would choose Option #1.

  • So yeah, sure we would love to be able to have Protonotes work natively in all browsers. But that is impossible due to browser security. The best option to offer the annotation functionality to diverse teams is to use an HTA.

  • Mozilla has XUL, somewhat similar to Microsoft's HTA, that we're looking into.