I loved it when it first came out. We built some really nice applications using ActiveX. The problem was when they enabled it in IE without thinking through the implications.
IIRC, by default, only intranet apps would be allowed to run ActiveX controls that were signed. Internet apps would prompt a warning - but as we all know now, users just clicked through them and enabled them to run.
ActiveX itself is very nice and very simple - it is, after all, just a documented interface for components.
It allowed us to port all those enterprise desktop apps into the browser. We had very efficient and fast web applications running in the browser long before the ajax revolution that came some years later. It completely changed the cost of IT and administration for a large number of businesses - you no longer had to maintain all these different custom-built desktop applications for every business unit - you just pointed their browser to the web app (we all know these advantages today, but back then it was completely revolutionary).
You couldn't do it with just HTML then, you can now thanks for the new input types, xmlhttprequest (from Microsoft) etc.
IIRC, by default, only intranet apps would be allowed to run ActiveX controls that were signed. Internet apps would prompt a warning - but as we all know now, users just clicked through them and enabled them to run.
ActiveX itself is very nice and very simple - it is, after all, just a documented interface for components.
It allowed us to port all those enterprise desktop apps into the browser. We had very efficient and fast web applications running in the browser long before the ajax revolution that came some years later. It completely changed the cost of IT and administration for a large number of businesses - you no longer had to maintain all these different custom-built desktop applications for every business unit - you just pointed their browser to the web app (we all know these advantages today, but back then it was completely revolutionary).
You couldn't do it with just HTML then, you can now thanks for the new input types, xmlhttprequest (from Microsoft) etc.
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