Browsers Compatible with MolSlide Development
All PE-compatible browsers plus
some others
work well for viewing or displaying MolSlides exported to Chime.
An even
wider range of browsers and platforms work for displaying
MolSlides exported to Jmol.
Below are browser-specific issues that apply to making MolSlides.
The issues below do not apply to saving command scripts for PiPEs
or for use in PE, Chime, or RasMol.
Because MolSlides are developed with Protein Explorer (PE), only PE-compatible
browsers are an option for MolSlide development. All
PE-compatible browsers are listed
below.
- Firefox 1.0, Netscape 7.2, Mozilla:
These browsers (the
Gecko family) are
highly recommended for development of
MolSlides (Windows only).
They are fully compatible with all PE and MolSlides functions,
and save exported MolSlides
from downloaded copies of PE
with no hassles. These browsers are free
(download here). They require
manual installation of Chime, which is easy
(you just have to copy a single file).
Firefox is particularly
recommended because its popup blocker can permit a downloaded copy of
PE to open windows, while still blocking on-line popups. As of May 2005,
it is the only Gecko browser with this capability.
- Netscape 8 is not (yet?) compatible
with Protein Explorer, so is not supported for MolSlide development.
- When running PE on-line from a server, these browsers cannot load
a PDB file that you have downloaded to your local disk. MolSlides can
be generated from on-line PDB files (loaded as PDB ID codes from the
on-line Protein Data Bank) and saved to your local disk, along with
the PDB files. However, if you use more than one PDB file in a set
of MolSlides, things will work best if you use a downloaded copy
of PE so you can load downloaded PDB files from your MolSlides folder,
as recommended.
- We regret that Internet Explorer
is NOT SUPPORTED
for development of MolSlides.
This is not by intent! We spent many days trying to work around the many
problems Internet Explorer has for saving MolSlides to disk, and for
importing saved MolSlides, but eventually gave up for this release.
We expect to be able to support MolSlide development in Internet Explorer
in a future release of PE.
- We regret that Netscape Communicator 4.5-4.8:
is NOT SUPPORTED
for development of MolSlides.
This is not by intent! We spent many days trying to work around the many
problems in Netscape 4 for saving MolSlides to disk, and for
importing saved MolSlides, but eventually gave up.
We particularly regret that this leaves no MolSlide development path
for Macintosh users, except to
use Windows, or purchase
Virtual PC for
Mac OSX.
We expect to be able to support MolSlide development in Mac Classic
Netscape 4.8 in a future release of PE. (Since Chime is not available
for OSX, and probably never will be, PE is limited to Classic on Macs.
Eventually we hope to make an entirely Jmol version of PE, but that
is a long way in the future.)
Feedback to
Eric Martz.