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Comment by eliben | Hacker News Reader

As opposed to Active X, PNaCl runs on all major OSes (desktop and ChromeOS so far, not mobile yet) and on all major CPU architectures.

Active X, AFAIR, was portable in true Henry Ford manner - running everywhere as long as it's a Wintel box with Internet Explorer.

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I believe Microsoft learned that lesson a decade ago. Since then, they've pushed Silverlight as an open, standardized, cross-platform programming environment for the web with virtually no success. This is the relevant comparison.

Wasn't Silverlight discontinued though?

Silverlight was a big success up until Sinofsky decided to kill it (with Silverlight, you could create rich apps and bypass Windows Store). Worst decision ever, I hope PNaCl takes over the world now.

Yes because the market always picks the superior technology.

> Microsoft Delivers ActiveX on the Macintosh > Oct. 17, 1996

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/1996/oct96/macpr.a...

Marginally off topic, but calling a A Windows box a Wintel box implies that there is functional, if not fundamental, difference between Windows/Intel machines and Windows/AMD machines. There isn't.

I ran all the same Active X controls on my WAMD box you did on your Wintel.

Or am I missing something about the Windows/Intel combination?

Anecdote: I switched to Mac (Mintel? Mactel?) in 2007. Prior to that, my 486DX4 100 (circa 1995) was the last Intel I used.

</offtopic>

I believe the term was coined this way because x86 was originally invented by Intel.

Although, indeed, Intel lost the control when AMD introduced AMD64. :) But this is really getting offtopic.

For a while there were non-x86 Windows NT boxes. In fact, there are again with Windows RT. Wintel versus WinDEC or Wintanium or WinMIPS, for example, though there was never enough market shire for any of those to justify a neologism.

From Wikipedia:

Wintel is a portmanteau of Windows and Intel, referring to personal computers using Intel x86 compatible processors running Microsoft Windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wintel

Wintel just refers to the instruction set, not the actual processor. The reason for using it in this case is that since ActiveX are compiled for x86, they won't run on other platforms that Windows runs on. In the past, Windows NT ran on PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS, and Itanium platforms; now Windows runs on ARM in the form of Windows Phone and Surface. So it's not just IE on Windows that is relevant for ActiveX, it's IE on Windows on x86. But that's a mouthful to say, so people abbreviate it to "Wintel".

Additionally, it is Open Source.

So what? It needs to be adopted by other vendors, otherwise it is just literature for sleepless nights.

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