On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 05:58:31PM -0500, Andrew C. Feren wrote:
> I noticed a surprising (to me) behavior today. If I type "ethereal"
> into the address field in Internet Expoder this causes the ethereal
> application to launch.
>
> My first thought was that IE was looking in the path for executables,
> but typing "notepad" or "wordpad", for example, results in an internet
> keyword search rather than running the executables.
>
> Can anyone explain what ethereal does to cause this behavior?
What it does is to have its installer put a file on the desktop named
"Ethereal.lnk", which is the "Ethereal" link.
I fired up IE 5.5 on my W2K machine, and typed "ethereal" as the
address. As soon as I'd typed the first "e", it offered, as choices:
3 "file:" URLs for files on my E: drive (a network drive with my
UNIX home directory, which - not surprisingly, as you might
guess from my work e-mail address - comes from a file server)
the E: drive itself
Ethereal.lnk
Search for "e"
and, as I typed more characters, some of the choices disappeared,
leaving only "Ethereal.lnk" and 'Search for "e..."' with the characters
I typed. (It'd probably have offered more URLs if I used it more
often.)
I then tried typing "winamp", as I also have a "WINAMP" link. As soon
as I typed the "w", it offered:
Web Events
a couple of URLs for an internal Web server whose name begins
with "web"
WINAMP.LNK
Windows Media Player.lnk
another URL for a server whose name begins with "www"
Search for "w"
and so on. I finished typing "winamp" and hit Enter, and, sure enough,
Nullsoft's program popped up.
> Was this behavior intended?
I suspect it was, in fact, intended by Microsoft to be the behavior that
IE exhibits. :-)
I guess this is all part of the "the Web is the desktop and it's all
integrated" stuff.