Thanks to reader Dylan for writing to report on his attempts to load ActiveX plug-ins associated with Google Sidebar. To see a list of installed ActiveX controls on your machine, follow these steps:
-
Click the menu arrow button at the top of Sidebar.
-
Select "Add/Remove Panels…"
-
Check the "Show ActiveX plug-ins…" box
-
Check the box next to one or more plug-ins.
-
Click OK.
The plug-ins tried by Dylan and by me are partially functional at best. The calendar crashed out of Sidebar when I
clicked a date. The Windows Media Player would not accept any input, typed or dragged. The browser, as in Dylan's
experience, accepted links dragged into it, but only one at a time. This feature could be useful as a sort of Web-page
scratch pad, but I wish I could throw several pages into it and move backward and forward among them. As it is, I do
better pasting URLs into the regular Scratch Pad to keep frequently cited pages at my fingertips. A Winamp controller
plug-in got me very excited, but I couldn't make it appear in Sidebar at all.
On my machine, there are dozens of ActiveX plug-ins to explore. TIP: if you have auto-hide set in the
Sidebar, it's obviously difficult to drag anything into a panel (such as a link into the browser.) But I don't want to
disable auto-hide. So I extend the panel (the browser in this case), which keeps the whole Sidebar, including the
extension, on the screen overlaying all other windows. When you're ready to hid the Sidebar again, just close the
extended panel.
1. Click on 'Options' in the Windows Media Player Active-X panel and you can paly anything you want. I have been using this for 2 days now...
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by avaksi