How to get AimExpress working on Mozilla, running on a Linux Box

So, I was at work and I was using AimExpress on the Windows side. I have Exceed running and I was working on some scripts on the AIX box. I didn't want to switch back and forth, so I tried running AimExpress on Mozilla. This is Mozilla 1.6, and the website says that it supports Mozilla 1.4 and up. So I try to run it, and of course, it doesn't work! It says the browser is unsupported! I look all over for documentation on this, but can't find any. I guess no one has tried to do this.

This bothered me a lot, so I tried getting past it. I closed AimExpress on the Windows side and restarted it. When the login screen came up, I looked at the properties and found the URL for it. I used that in Mozilla and the login screen came up! Schweet! I logged in, but then I got the unsupported browser error... I wasn't sure what to do... I knew that AimExpress ran on IE as some sort of DHTML application... If I was just able to get the address of the page, I was pretty sure I could run it on Mozilla by accessing that page directly. But they had disabled the context menu on the app, so there was no way I could find anything. There wasn't even a menu bar. So I looked to see if there were any shortcut keys to View Source or Properties, or anything like that. I saw F11 for Full Screen. So just for the hell of it, I tried it out. And Voila! There was an address bar on the top, and I could see the address!

I took the address and put it in Mozilla. I accessed the page and I got the sign-on thing again. I signed in and I got the stupid "Unsupported Browser" page again. Then I figured they are definitely using cookies (or sessions), so I accessed the AIM DHTML App page again and BINGO! I was logged in! 🙂 Hehehe... I was so proud of myself!

Anyway, so here are the steps:

1. Fire up Mozilla and enter http://aimexpress.aim.com/BuddyList.svc in the address bar.
2. Log in. It will come up with an error page. Don't worry. Enter http://aimexpress.aim.com/BuddyList.svc in the address bar again.
3. AimExpress should be up and running! Enjoy!