Broken Browser Support for Video Surveillance

I would argue we're not engaged in a "Security" industry. As the last 3 years have proven, this is merely video surveillance. "Security" is just a word.

Thanks for this article and hopefully manufacturers pull their head out of the sand. This is my biggest gripe with manufacturers right now - your great products are USELESS if there is no human interface that works. Forcing people to use Internet Exploder is a good way to lose business and no solution to any problem. This problem is across the board with IOT devices, in the IT world most switches etc. which are configurable via IP at least have command line interface. I would vastly prefer this to a half a$$ed browser interface. That said I am not sure how you would tune motion detection settings etc. without a visual interface.

Dahua doesn't support chrome correctly. You can't login! You have to use IE / Edge or firefox..

I had a bit of fun getting March Networks working across a corporate network when I needed IT involvement many times in getting Silverlight onto client machines

I have a Dahua camera here that now uses a Chrome app.  

Web Service/Easy Viewer

Edit:  Details here.

Double Edit:  In case anyone didn't know, Win 10 still has IE installed although it's not easily found.  Simplest way is Windows Key + R to bring up the "Run" window and then just type in "iexplore"

Delighted to see this topic given more attention.

ActiveX, is among other things, just an easy way of extending your Visual Studio authored VMS code into a device. Who would ever want to connect with a browser that is not IE or use an OS that’s not Windows? Seems strange that a lot of camera products expose a feature rich ReSTful API and then stop short of creating a browser agnostic, video capable interface.

Along the same lines I would love to see an article identifying which popular VMS offerings are not primarily authored in a Visual Studio IDE. Seems to me that there is a strong correlation with products having cross platform functionality and innovation in both the UI and in integration possibilities.

**Hanwha employee**

Great article and thanks for bringing attention to an important topic that has been shrugged off for many years.  So often it is a nightmare just trying to get a customer's camera to stream video to then be able to start troubleshooting.  Plug in free UI is a huge game changer that is many years overdue for this industry.

One quick note.

The latest Hanwha cameras (X series, not sure about P, Q) can also support H.264 in plugin free browsers, with limited frame rate & resolution.  I just tested viewing with a 720p profile at 10fps, and it worked in Chrome & Edge.

In browsers with the plugin, there is a button to click on to disable the plugin, if ever needed.

Without the plugin installed, you can still get to the setup page of the web UI.

With a large number of Chinese developments as one can presume, it should not come across as a shock that the net results are as the current trends are subject to the development tools used.

A glance here. https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php gives you idea what really the development community for security should be looking at.

The main issue with at least the larger companies is their majority profit caters for domestic market, where windows XP, and Windows 7 are the main players in town!

You can see why Windows8 didn't take off either here.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/182735-chinese-government-bans-windows-8-due-to-microsofts-retirement-of-windows-xp

So anything outside the WindowsXP & 7 had been a 2nd consideration.

I believe it is not what the developers would always agree about, engineers tend to be tech savvy and would maybe run later systems like windows10 (choke choke).

But at the end of the day deadlines, to complete! rush! and goal kick the release build to sell a few more tins of beans (AKA Cameras) out, takes their priority.

As the first comment was right, a lot of so called security lacks in many ways fundamentally what this industry now lacking. The only way to change direction is via education and making the right purchase.

At least for now, the ESR versions of firefox (32 bit versions) still have MMX plugin support for the web UI.  Tested and it works.  I am working with a developer to create a standalone viewer app which eliminates the browser entirely (windows), it would be fine for clients who just want a way to move and view their camera(s).

Get it here:  https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/

Great to see this topic getting covered in IPVM.

At Brivo we recognize that our products must support multiple major browsers and that continuous integration of modern browsers is required to maintain functionality and security.

There is a workaround on Chrome browser.  Just need to search for "IE Tab" in Chrome Web Store and install it.

Have to search the office just to find a windows PC to run IE to configure Hikvision cameras.  A real nuisance. 

No reason why the straight text configure settings require any plugin at all. Very annoying.  Also makes it impossible to script.

Here's a fix for your current version of Firefox to resolve the plugin issue:

open a new browser tab in firefox
1. enter the following: about:config
2. you will be prompted with a security warning, accept
3. right click on the screen over one of the existing commands and go to "New" then select "Boolean"
4. enter the following: plugin.load_flash_only
5. accept/ok
6. set tag to "false"
7. accept/ok
8. press "shift+F2" to open command line
9. type "restart"
10. this will force firefox restart and when it comes back up you should be good to go

I've heard updates will disable this feature again but haven't had any updates to firefox yet to find out. 

I believe there's a terminal command you can use to re-enable NPAPI. I know that sounds unbelievable... and I haven't ran the command yet to verify it; it MAY be per session/instance... but I'm not sure. I have a MASSIVE list of shit to get caught up on tomorrow; if I'm able. I will attempt to get the terminal line for Mac users who want access. 

Hello, my company has a solution to this issue.  Its a standalone windows app, which does away with the web browser entirely. Not a full-featured app like Blue Iris or the Smart PSS software,  its intended to replace the web browser for clients/users who just want to look at their cameras with minimal configuration needed or hidden menus.

Its portable, and easy on resources. For all Dahua and clone cameras/NVR's.

https://preferredsolutions.us/

Update: Safari 12 has now removed support for NPAPI: