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Comment by natbro | Hacker News Reader

ever heard of ActiveX? you know, arbitrary code installing and running in your browser on Windows and available to be scripted by javascript? like, instead of Java? sorry. I'm not solely responsible, but sorry, pretty responsible. we were young. code-signing as a means of validating origin was a great idea. though it needed additional infrastructure to prevent abuse and allow global revocation, and that wasn't perfectly thought through or executed. live and learn. :grinning-emoji:

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Just like to say a big thank you for this. When ActiveX was no longer acceptable I wrote some desktop integration technology which replaced it for web apps with an http based background messaging protocol and activation via URL handler. This was sold to some large corporates. This made me a fuck load of money over the last decade or so. If you hadn't built ActiveX this wouldn't have been possible.

You wrote me a house.

If it helps, you guys are still way more popular than the folks who work on Teams.

I hate Teams so so much. It’s by far the worst piece of software on my Mac.

Teams started hogging my keyboard media keys last week just to play the ring tone twice when pressing play/pause. The media player won't react to these inputs anymore and I have to click with my mouse. Nice going, Teams devs.

It's the worst software in my PC by far. The only reason it is used by my company is because it's free with Office 365. Even ICQ was a better chat client in 2002.

I wonder if the Teams guys feel guilty about all the unnecessarily burned CPU time. Every time I'm compiling code my Teams experience degrades to a point where I wonder if I'm using a 133 MHz PC again and forgot to press the Turbo button.

> Teams started hogging my keyboard media keys last week just to play the ring tone twice when pressing play/pause. The media player won't react to these inputs anymore and I have to click with my mouse. Nice going, Teams devs.

Have also been experiencing this, call finishes so I press play to turn music back on, hear teams dialling tone. Annoyingly triggering

ActiveX had been EVERYWHERE in South Korea and it was the main reason behind IE being used even into early 2010s.

It feels surreal to come across someone who was responsible for something I hated so much back then. But now I’m just fascinated for some reason. I’d buy you a drink if I could :p

Early 2010s? Up until about 5 years ago if you wanted to do any banking you’d be doing it through IE and about half a dozen “security” activex plugins.

Except on mobile, which is what everybody preferred for obvious reasons.

I actually miss the parts of ActiveX that weren't tied to the web. Like the ability to write UI widgets in different PLs and then integrate them in one app. Or the ability to embed arbitrary documents into other documents, complete with a near-seamless rendering and editing experience. It's too bad that the idea didn't catch on.

I'd like to thank you for your work. Without it, I might not have had the motivation to move completely to Linux.

Hi Nat! Long before I joined the company, I remember fondly the COR Design Review meetings from ... 1998(?) after you ruined the world with ActiveX :)

That was pretty cool. I worked for a project that used ActiveX controls on webpages, via a private site you could only access through a private dial in number. Worked great.

I almost forgive you and your team mates.

Mozilla hated ActiveX so much they cloned it with XP/COM.

So glad I entered the game as ActiveX was being phased out haha.

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