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Mozilla 1.4 Alpha To Have ActiveX Support
quakeslut writes "According to the newly posted Mozilla Staff Minutes, Moz is set to have initial ActiveX support for the next alpha. ActiveX... be afraid... be very afraid."
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I wonder, why couldn't they make this an optional plugin? I definitely don't need ActiveX for anything.
Let's hope it'll be left out from Phoenix...
Run Windows?
... ]
... MS has proven this quite well time after time. The fact that Mozilla is doing this is PROOF that we aren't since if we had our choice, most of us would rather see ActiveX die in favor of more open choices and possibly even Java.
Want ActiveX?
Run friggin Explorer!
["We" in the following is whoever you want "us" to be
We most definitely know that we are not the center of the Universe
I won't care if ActiveX is in Mozilla -too- much as long as it can be disabled from loading and bloating my memory footprint even further. I've lived without ActiveX for years, I don't need to change it.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
That's a wrong characterization of what kind of "ActiveX support" we're going to have. What is going in will allow those who want ActiveX to run it with a plugin. You still have to install the plugin manually. Mozilla won't run ActiveX stuff unless you download additional software to let it do that. Some intranet users actually need this, so this support is a very nice addition to Mozilla.
OK, this is severly karma-whoring, but let's ask the source: Mozilla ActiveX Project.
There have been plug-ins for Mozilla to run ActiveX controls since before 1.0, so that's not new. I believe this just means that the code for making it possible for Mozilla to be used as an ActiveX control is getting into the trunk.
Among the interesting tidbit: CodeWeavers CrossOver Plugin 1.2 so you can host ActiveX controls in Linux now.
Nothing hugely earth-shattering, though.
I allow neither Java nor ActiveX and I'm able to surf the Web just fine. I don't see why Mozilla thinks they need it, and they'd damn well better give us a way to disable it.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Mozilla has had various bits of ActiveX supporting code available to those that want it for some time. There have been plugin wrappers that make ActiveX controls sort of work in Mozilla and Netscape. There has been a Gecko wraper that alows Mozilla's rendering engine to be embedded as an ActiveX control like MSHTML. Various Mozilla contributors have been interested in and working on this stuff for a long time. Some of this support was even available in the Communicator days. None of this is built in the default Mozilla releases and so Mozilla releases do not support ActiveX.
--Asa
This is merely another case of Slashdot editors not even looking at what they post - this is nonsense. For information on what ActiveX work *is* happening within the Mozilla project, visit Adam Lock's (the developer of mozilla ActiveX stuff) site. Try the FAQ.
If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
If you build Mozilla yourself you can enable Active X support. This has been around for quite a while. But Mozilla.org builds will never have it enabled by default.
Plug-in For Hosting ActiveX Controls http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm
Phillip
And how about the buffer overrun in programs signed by Microsoft? See http://slashdot.org/articles/02/11/21/1317229.shtm l?tid=172
Signing doesn't solve the problem because there are buggy programs that are signed. So anybody can distribute them and you will happily run it. And revocation doesn't work because nobody really does it.
The only reasonable solution is to have an on-line repository of known checksums. And any time you'd need to run something unknown, you'd check the MD5 sum of the program against the database.
It could be used instead of rpm -Va as well. You wouldn't need to trust the (potential modified) rpm database on your disk, you'd check against central database.
Anybody upto building such a thing?
More funny than this is that Microsoft recommends to not trust ActiveX controls signed by them. So now you can't trust unsigned and signed ActiveX controls.
An ActiveX control (widget) is nothing more than a software module that implements a raft of crufty interfaces (the interfaces are ugly on account of the legacy aspects, and few programmer know what they even are because they use the wizards in whatever development tools they are using to automatically barf out code) based on the COM specification, and an ActiveX container (such as a Visual Basic app or an IE page) is nothing more than a program that supports that raft of interfaces.
An ActiveX control is a Good Thing because it is the closest thing to a "software IC" in the Windows GUI world -- it is amazingly cross-language in the Windows world. The new .NET languages consume and produce ActiveX controls with ease. It is not such a good thing because an ActiveX control kinda assumes it has access to the entire Windows API, so it is really locked in to Windows.
Also, an ActiveX control on a Web page is typically a client-side thing, think Java applet only without the sandboxing, so besides MS-lockin, you completely blow security, and the MS answer to security is this lame signing business (Scouts honor, this control is secure!). But since it lacks sandboxing, it is really quite capable and powerful -- it is like running little Windows apps inside your browser.
Part of Miguel de Icaza's deal with his Mono initiative is that he would like to see the Open Source world have something as software IC-like as the ActiveX control, and he things that his clone of .NET is the way to do it with some degree of sandboxing by using .NET widgets as the standard instead of ActiveX.
SVG is beautiful, elegant, powerful, and open. It's possible to completely define a very complex and dynamic user interface in it. And that's exactly why we'll never see it in any browsers that matter - not in IE because of the obvious threat to MS UI hegemony, and not in Netscape/Mozilla because there's just not enough interest and not enough capable programmers.
It's sad, because SVG is probably one of the best an most important technologies of the early 21st century, but barring huge changes in the world, it will probably not be allowed to set us free.
FWIW, I would despereately love to use SVG, but just this week decided aginst it in a new project, simply because the world is not ready for it, and Batik is the closest thing there is to a real SVG viewer, and it is certainly not really usable in the world at large. I really hope this changes, but I'm not too optimistic right now.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last