title: Accessing .mdb or SQL databases using javascript in Firefox/Chrome
body: <p>I have been tasked with creating something that summarizes and displays information from a database (that is stored either in an SQL server or as an .mdb).  I <em>cannot</em> convince my company that we need to use an actual application for this, since I am apparently the only one  that understands Visual Basic or C#.  All of the other programmers know only HTML and Javascript, and since they're worried about making something that only one person can maintain (can't say I blame them, since I'm not looking forward to being the only person who can answer our customer's questions), these are the languages I'm limited to.<BR>
  I've had a fair amount of success in creating ActiveX ADO objects for manipulating databases, but it's my understanding that this function won't work at all in browsers other than IE.  Since I'm absolutely sure that this will be their next demand of me, is anyone aware of any way to read databases (stored locally on the computer displaying the page, in a shared folder on the network, or in an SQL database on that network) in non-IE browsers?<BR>
  I've found various plugins to allow these sorts of things; this might work as a last resort, but I'm really trying to avoid having to tell the customers that our app will only work if they install some random plugin.<BR>
  Any ideas?</p>