"ActiveX is definitely going cross-platform," Willis says. "To be a viable technology for the Internet, we need to be able to support more platforms than Microsoft Windows. You cannot predict what kind of platforms will be on the other end."
Are you making an objective technical argument, or a solipsistic one?
If your complaint is that ActiveX controls used the Win32 API, then you're missing the point. A Mac or Linux ActiveX control would use OS-native APIs, but still use COM and be an ActiveX control.
Furthermore, if you had even looked up the Wikipedia page for ActiveX, you'd see that:
"On 17 October 1996, Microsoft announced availability of the beta release of the Microsoft® ActiveX Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Macintosh."
Yep, so non-portable that they released a Mac SDK back when Macs were PowerPC. Super non-portable. The non-portablest.
"It was introduced in 1996 and is commonly used in its Windows operating system. In principle it is not dependent on Microsoft Windows, but in practice, most ActiveX controls require either Microsoft Windows or a Windows emulator. Most also require the client to be running on Intel x86 hardware, because they contain compiled code."
What rational comparison do you have between NaCL's constrained syscall interface + Pepper, and ActiveX?
> Yep, so non-portable that they released a Mac SDK back when Macs were PowerPC. Super non-portable. The non-portablest.
Which produced binaries that couldn't run on any other PPC OS other than Mac OS, and provided a runtime that couldn't run the ActiveX controls being deployed for Windows clients, even if it was somehow magically possible to run x86 code.
It was explicitly advertised as being non-portable, as a feature: "Developers can create ActiveX Controls for the Mac that integrate with other components and leverage the full functionality of the Mac operating system, taking advantage of features such as Apple QuickTime."
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/1996/oct96/macpr.a...
So, yes, "non-portablest".
What exactly is the equivalence to (P)NaCL?
Things might get more interesting if NaCL provides a higher performance deployment target for Chrome users than asm.js does. Then you can just cross-compile for both.