What do you think, Wouldn't it be great if Seek was easier to use with Firefox via a Firefox plug-in or something?
I am not sure if that would be something easy or something hard to do but I know that keeps people from using Firefox.

You mean to access other sharers' machines? The thing that does that is explorer, not Internet explorer. There is no plugin which will integrate FF with explorer, nor will there probably ever be one. You can still search with FF, just open up explorer and type the computer name in the location bar.

You simply need to use another file sharing system.. seek42 is only good for internet explorer. You can get clients that search the network for files, just like seek42 (only they would search everyone, thus improving your search results). The theory behind why Seek42, and other, better, umr based file search engines like seekant, do/did not do this is because some people may get upset. This, however, is highly unlikely since most people are opted in to seek42 anyways... and the others probably can't detect that you are scanning them. Even if they can, it is not harmful, and I doubt they would complain. If they would, they should shut down their shares or pw protect them.

You can find a lot of these applications by doing a few google searches. Some OSs come with tools that can do this automatically. I think Mac comes with one... and so does Linux.

You just have to copy and paste the computer name.

I use a Mac so I have to do the same thing, copy and paste it to connect via smb, its sorta a pain in the ass, but still better than an internet p2p blient

I think Mac actualy has a scan function build in that will scan the network for files. I am not sure... I think I've seen it used. (and I didn't think it was due to 3rd party software).

There is an Open with IE extension for firefox.

some simple changes to seek42 itself could allow the non-windows users to use firefox (or mozilla, konqueror, etc). just need to use smb://addr/share (when *nix detected) instead of file://\\addr\share or whatever it is now.

edit: or even just have an option to set under preferences that selects \\ or smb://

I am also a Mac user but I try to keep my windows buddies safe and secure and so I try to get them to use firefox but when they reilize that they have to go through those extra steps to get things from seek, they decide that IE is good enough for them. I think that enough people are using Firefox or other browsers now (ex: SAFARI!) that it would make sence to make some adaptations.

I dont even know how it would work in Safari, I typed smb://something in the address bar and it just gave me some error about using the wrong protocol, so for us, I think the only option is what we've got now.

the browser has to support the smb protocol. mozilla and mozilla-firefox for linux do (via gnome-vfs), and of course the file managers konqueror and nautilus do, but i dont really know much about macs

Do you have to use the gnome desktop for smb to work correctly in linux? I can get mozilla to list the contents of a directory but none of the links work.

you dont have to have or use the gnome desktop to use smb w/ firefox or mozilla, but it will require several gnome libs. assuming your package manager is doing its job, you shouldnt have to worry about this.

i just tried it myself, and for some reason i can't get mozilla to get past smb://computername... if i try to open any specific shares, it doesnt do anything. doesnt even try. firefox still works fine though. this is w/ mozilla 1.7.3 and firefox 1.0

I just installed firefox, it works better with the smb protocol, it actually does something when I click links.


I like this idea, it's annoying having to replace
http://131.151.191.95:8080/\\131.151.xxx.xxx\share\file
with
smb://131.151.xxx.xxx/share/file

Just use browser AND/OR operating system detection. It's been done at UMR before.. can quite easily be done again.

Actually its the php web interface that determines the compatibility you're talking about. If someone would be so kind as to sit down and list out what format you want each browser to use, I can code it up. The problem is, nobody ever emails me, they just bitch in the forum about how it doesn't work.

So, as soon as I get such an email or a post to this thread listing out all the browsers and the URI format for file access, I will do it. Or, fuck it, I can just code it up so you can specify exactly what you want in a text box.

I've actually been working on another personal project that will (hopefully) solve this problem. If my classwork ever gets done I might just get around to getting a working version of it out to the campus for testing. I promise it will be good