Monday, August 31, 2009

Why Firefox Should Support ActiveX




Check it out. Pretty sweet, huh? If you're using Firefox or Safari, you won't be able to see it. It's a calendar. All you have to do to embed one in a page is type the following code:

<object classid="clsid:232E456A-87C3-11D1-8BE3-0000F8754DA1"></object>

That's one line of code. In contrast, I made a calendar on my site in HTML, CSS, and Javascript that performs most of the same functions: http://home.comcast.net/~richmaxw. I made that with 95 lines of code, plus 33 lines of CSS and a 40 lines of JavaScript. I had to add the JavaScript to ensure it would display properly in browsers other than Internet Explorer. There are many other ActiveXObjects you can use. You can browse them using OLE View. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer 8 seems to be moving away from ActiveX. I added a Windows Media Player object to a site of mine and whenever someone tries to view it, it displays a warning asking if the user is sure they want to watch the movie. Flash objects don't trigger the warning. It must be a security issue, but crackers can exploit all features of a browser, including JavaScript, for malicious purposes. Should we disable JavaScript, too?

2 comments:

Andrew said...

Sorry if this is a stupid question but I was looking for a 100% definitive answer on this...

Can we say 100% and for the record that there is currently NO WAY to get an activeX control to run inside firefox?

Not even with a plug-in or something?

Richard said...

Hi. There is an ActiveX plug-in, but it's only for Firefox 1.5: http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm. The source code is also available, so I wonder if it can be installed into the latest Firefox version that way?