The End of Active X and the Microsoft Internet

Microsoft’s attempts to take control over dynamic Web content are officially over. My proclamation comes after hearing from Marty Focazio, who works for ScribeStudio.com. The company offers a service for users to quickly create, package and publish their own dynamic content, such as e-Learning Programs, video seminars and multimedia presentations.

Marty is just one of many people that changing their Web sites over from Active X and popups to display dynamic and interactive content. I’ll let him explain.

While I was not here when that decision was made, I am faced with dealing with the downstream effects of having a service that won't run on Firefox, occasionally requires the installation of an Active-X control, is Mac-hostile and requires people to explicitly allow pop-ups. So what's the alternative? In a word, Ajax.

In many ways, we have to go Ajax, just to reach our corporate customers, because we're seeing flat-out bans on Active-X, a pretty substantial move away from IE, and an increasing number of Mac systems. Not to mention that a site that uses unrequested pop-ups, whether it's our own or the US Postal Service, can't be around that much longer. So we're fixing these issues. It's not pleasant and it's not fun.

The reasons for the use of Active-X and Pop-ups were essentially that the user needed to be able to interact with the server and stored data in a way that wasn't really possible without Active-X, or at least not to the level of interaction that's more like a "local" application, in terms of things you can do with the data on your computer and on the web server.

For example, we have a really nice text editor - word processor, really, that is pretty much the same as the Writely product Google recently bought. But again, that's an Active-X control, not an Ajax-y thing, so that's gotta go. That's the root of the issue -- our application lets people create online versions of their courses, events and presentations, and there's a huge amount of data interaction involved, so the ability to extend the user's computer into our servers and vice versa is at the heart of the matter.

In the end, it's kind of the whole "network is the computer" model that's making Ajax compelling for us. Yeah, that's old news, but when you treat a web browser as a "sandbox" for your application, and you have what feels like live data interaction, you can begin to do what Java promised and never delivered. Instead of slow-loading, jerky applets with annoying interfaces and horrendously pokey jsp servers, with Ajax like development, I have a "never stop writing, run almost anywhere" environment which is less sexy than "Write once, run anywhere" but is more pragmatic and fits the reality of the market.

0 thoughts on “The End of Active X and the Microsoft Internet

  1. You’re
    right, of course, about the movement toward
    smarmier browser-based apps; the most obvious
    example is Google Earth, but others abound. The
    first time I saw my browser do incremental map
    updates (instead of “clear and redraw”) I knew
    the world had changed. Udell has been making
    (what seemed to me) wild claims about how clever
    browser-based apps could be in InfoWorld for
    about 2 years now, only to be proven right about
    Ajax and other next-gen browser programming methods.

    Still: Do you believe there will be any official
    movement away from ActiveX by Microsoft? It would
    be a huge tectonic shift, a 7.2 on the Microsoft
    Watcher’s Magnitude Scale, if ActiveX was
    suddenly deprecated in favor of more portable methods.

    ActiveX has another problem that MS isn’t
    addressing: Even x64 Windows won’t run it
    natively–you must use the 32-bit browser to
    visit (e.g.) Windows Update. And Windows Update
    (or Microsoft Update, if you prefer) seem likely
    to stay ActiveX based, for now–though I seem to
    remember vaguely a whole argument about how
    insane it was to download native code to the
    client, back in the days when Netscape was what
    all the cool kids used. No gloating, just an observation.

    Certainly another factor to contrast here is the
    non-appearance of “Official” IE7, still in
    eternal beta. Again WinHEC would seem the right
    place to address this; I do expect to ask pointed
    questions about this and related indicators, repeatedly if necessary, in May.

    In the bigger picture, we (this would be the
    Chaos Manor position, as kicked around by the
    above persons) tend to think MS has decided they
    can’t directly win the browser war, or more
    likely that it’s just no longer an existential
    threat. Hence, the lack of push for IE7, while
    FireFox has undergone tremendous improvements.
    This in turn suggests MS no longer considers
    FireFox and the like a dagger pointed at the
    heart of Windows sales; people aren’t buying
    network computers nor throwing over to Linux in stock-price-decimating numbers.

    Whether Vista itself is the compelling reason for
    millions of upgrade sales–that’s the real larger
    question. Everything else seems subordinate to that, from their perspective.

    Sincerely,
    Alex Pournelle

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