MIME handler for Internet Explorer

Question

I want to have an equivalent of NPAPI plugin for Firefox (or just any other sane browser). Generally I need IE to start my own program in response to object tag and let it draw the content itself.

Where do I start?

I tried to look it up on MSDN

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa902517.aspx

but could not find anything suitable.

Answer 1

The equivalent plugin mechanism for IE is an ActiveX content extension. This is cumbersome to do by hand, so do it using support from MFC or ATL.

Here are two tutorials that turned up on a web search (there are many more out there):

• ATL based
• MFC based

If you need to support both NPAPI and ActiveX, take a look at our FireBreath framework. Its goal is to write the plugin only once and let the framework take care of ActiveX and NPAPI support.
At the very least you could use the sources as a reference if needed - use src/ActiveXPlugin and specifically FBControl and JSAPI_IDispatchEx as a starting point.