You can, but that results in a ton of UI where the user has to navigate between "allow" custom protocol and then selecting what applications are allowed to launch via this protocol.

Currently it's a maze of dialogs only technical people are able to navigate successfully. Expecting people already in need of support to manage to bypass this deliberate inconvenience is simply unrealistic.

The company I work for used to maintain a solution based on this approach. It worked well until browser-vendors started tightening up security.

After that we had to come up with a different solution all together, because almost no users managed to configure our integration successfully.

(And that rewrite was a lot of work, so I can see why Cisco/WebEx has been postponing it as much as possible)

I don't know exactly what the extension does behind the scenes, but I use Webex daily for my job and almost all my clients suggest just using the temporary application to join is a better experience by far. The extension constantly fails to launch the application correctly and from what I'm told does some other non-sense that causes CPU spikes and connectivity issues.

It also doesn't inspire confidence that this is the screenshot of the Chrome Extension they give users to encourage them to use the extension: http://imgur.com/a/Rsy3H

(For those who don't want to click, the screenshot showing the install has the rating from the Chrome Webstore, which is currently at 2 stars)

I mean, I applaud the honesty of showing us what users have rated it, but it just seems kind of sloppy to me.