Microsoft Corp’s World Wide Web bandwagon continues to pick up converts last month following an agreement signed with San Francisco-based Macromedia Inc, which will see the latter’s Shockwave multimedia technology being integrated into Microsoft’s ActiveX and Internet Explorer 3.0 to provide multimedia viewing capabilities. As part of the agreement, Shockwave – which is claimed to have two million users, making it arguably the de facto standard for viewing multimedia and graphics on the Internet – will be the first ActiveX control that Microsoft packages with Internet Explorer, Windows95 and the Windows95 OEM kit. Macromedia will support ActiveX and Explorer with Shockwave and the Backstage Designer Web authoring Shockwave is designed to compress graphical files to reduce the time it takes to download them over the Internet by streaming, which breaks down the files and downloads them in background as other information is being displayed on the page. Internet Explorer 3.0 and the ActiveX control of Shockwave are planned to be available this summer and will be downloadable free either from http://www.microsoft.com/ or http://www.macromedia.com/ up to 80% of their capacity, claims the company. AutoPilot currently comes with the Chen-1000.
