I do alot of conference calls with vendors and customers. Every vendor uses a different service, but most are WebEx, Citrix (gotomeeting or gotowebinar), Raindance or Readytalk. I recently switched to a Mac (I love it by the way…I’ll post on that someday). All of the above web demo services have worked great accept for WebEx. Since WebEx is the most popular, it drove me insane that I had to dig to find the solution.
After I entered the registration information and tried to enter the meeting, WebEx showed me this screen:
No security message appeared, because nothing was downloaded. Neither of those manual downloads work on a Mac, since they are .msi files.
A search for "Mac" or "OSX" on the WebEx website offers a bunch of foreign language pages and the FAQ, where you find:
Q.Can I attend if I’m on a Mac?
A.You can attend a web seminar with Mac OSX or above.
Ok, that’s it? No links to more information? No explanation? Lazy copywriters.
At this point, I still had no clue that Firefox was the problem. A Google search found the WebEx downloads page for me, which looked promising.
Like everyone else, I scan a web page. I don’t read every little thing. Here the "test your system" link is small. I didn’t notice it at first. I noticed the manual client download, which won’t work because I have an Intel machine. This was also frustrating. I later noticed the "test your system" link, which led me to the solution:
It tells me I need to use Safari. That’s fine. Why didn’t they tell me that when I tried to connect using Firefox? Or on the FAQ?
Is this something I should have known?
If you use WebEx alot, make sure you tell your Mac OSX attendees to use Safari so they don’t have to hunt this down either.
9 responses so far ↓
1 Treffin // Mar 7, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Did you actually get Safari to work with WebEx? I have had no luck at all getting it going. If you download the WebEx for OSX install stuff, it installs but still doesn’t work correctly on my iBook G4. I searched thru the webex site and found that it wants you to use IE which only runs under Carbon (OS9). I haven’t been able to make that one work either! ugh.
Treffin
2 Jon // Mar 28, 2007 at 1:44 am
Treffin, I sent you an email, but I’ll respond here as well so everyone else can see the answer. I was able to join the meeting without a hitch and without installing anything manually when using Safari. It fired right up.
3 Scott Spain // Apr 18, 2007 at 11:36 am
I too am having difficulty accessing a Webex meeting on an Intel Mac.
When I run the system test in the link you provided, I pass the test just fine. But when I follow a meeting invitation, it rejects me. I even called WebEx, and they told me I was out of luck if I was on a Mac.
Are you following meeting links that look like this?:
https://mwmus.webex.com/mwmus/jm.php?PWD=&MK=123123123
Or are you running the system test each time, then entering a meeting number? I tried that using the value of the URL variable “MK” (in this case 123123123, and that doesn’t seem to work either.
Any advice?
Thanks.
4 Jon Robinson // Apr 19, 2007 at 9:08 am
Scott, I do follow links like yours but instead but some of the queries are different: Mine are usually in this form:
https://name.webex.com/name/j.php?ED=99999999&UID=999999999
I don’t know how much of a difference that makes. It is sad that Webex said you were up a creek with a Mac.
With Safari I haven’t had any problems. The webex sessions start right up. I don’t have to run any tests or anything. Let me now how it goes. You have java installed and javascript and cookies turned on right?
5 Alon // May 4, 2007 at 3:27 am
We are using Gotomeeting (citrix) and the problem with Mac is that you can only attend meeting and not be organizer… thats a shame…. I had to buy XP and run paralles to arrnge a meeting!
6 viktorya // Mar 26, 2008 at 3:04 pm
I’m on a MAC G4 OSX 10.4 and would like to have a remote meeting capability for some of my clients. Can I run the meeting with WEBEX? Thanks for your help! V
7 Jon Robinson // Mar 26, 2008 at 9:02 pm
@viktorya honestly I’m not sure, but last I heard you can’t howt webex on a mac. You might want to try Yugma : http://www.yugma.com
8 Jon Robinson // Mar 26, 2008 at 9:13 pm
readytalk works too
9 Jessica Lubber // Jul 24, 2008 at 12:53 pm
There is an article on running the new Gotomeeting version on a Mac at http://bukawow.com It seems that it requires at least version 2.0 of Firefox which should be okay for most.
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