If you have Internet Explorer from Microsoft installed on your PC, Active Worlds will use it to display web pages in a window contained within the Active Worlds browser itself. This is a powerful and easy way to view web content alongside the 3D content of Active Worlds. Many citizens and world owners have augmented their 3D creations with links to web pages. If you are not using the integrated web browser, you are missing out on a substantial portion of the Active Worlds experience!

The web browser can be turned on and off from the Show Menu or from the Show Web button in the toolbar (not available in simple mode.)

If you do not have Internet Explorer™ installed on your PC, we recommend that you download and install it. If you are a Netscape user, you can continue to use Netscape to view web pages outside of Active Worlds, even if you have Internet Explorer installed. Internet Explorer does not need to be your default web browser in order for Active Worlds to take advantage of its functionality. It simple needs to be present on your PC.

Why we don't support Netscape

Actually, we do support Netscape. If you absolutely do not want Internet Explorer installed on your PC, you can still use Netscape to view web pages in Active Worlds. However, to do so you must separately start up Netscape and run it concurrently with Active Worlds (we do not recommend this on PCs with less than 32 megabytes of RAM.) If Netscape is running, Active Worlds will send the URLs it encounters to the Netscape browser for display. You will have to switch back and forth between Active Worlds and Netscape in order to view the web pages.

What we can't do is run Netscape inside Active Worlds the way we do with Internet Explorer. This is because the integrated web page window is implemented using ActiveX. Internet Explorer is capable of running inside other applications as an ActiveX control, while the Netscape browser is not.