Once again, my heartfelt gratitude to the members of this forum for their comments and encouragement to help me find some solutions here.
I didn't know that VLC Player (or PotPlayer) could display the live stream from the cameras, or even what rtsp was.
I also happened upon a nice utility called
ONVIF, which was on sourceforge.net (and maybe other places too, but that was where a search took me to download it) and it will find all the cameras on your network and display them. Once you select a camera and enter the address, it will actually show the video, too, and with passwords and all, allow you to enter into the 'web page' being generated by the HIK camera.
Along the bottom of that screen is the address, port, and the channel information which can be copy and pasted into VLC or whatever.
For me, this will be an answer to the function that FireFox provided in the past. I'll just have to go to a different program on my computer to look at the cameras.
So far, the only thing I see I've lost (and I've not been in all the nooks and crannies yet) is the ability to toggle on and off the record to disk, which under a browser was a camera and a movie camera on the bottom right. I might not have everything configured for these new ways of seeing the stream, or maybe there isn't a way to do the record as I was under FireFox.
I have IE 11.0.9600 and it will not show the stream no matter how many times I try installing the webcomponents and restarting the browser. I'm not sure which version you're using, but I agree, time to turn the install update off as far as wanting to use this method, at risk of some vulnerabilities that might get plugged.
Once again, a big thanks to the tips you guys offered.
If I get the lawn raked, family stuff done and taxes filed, I'll try to help others by putting together a basic update on what I discovered. Most of the folks here using cameras seem to be so more aware and knowledgeable than I that it probably won't be of any value, but maybe someone will come along that is missing that one key part to get them happy again.
Dale