"Ahem A Rivet's Shot"  wrote

| >    You think MS is to blame? Javascript was being phased
| > out, with close to 10% of people disabling it, a few years
| > sgo. The same with iframes. What changed it had nothing
| > to do with Microsoft. It was targetted ads and the spying
| > that goes with them.
|
| That was *long* after ActiveX made having JavaScript affect the
| machine instead of just the sandbox a thing.
|

  Yes, it was long after. ActiveX had been seen to be an
untenable approach online going forward. Java was being
phased out. People were even starting to see the problem
of Flash. People were seeing that executable code in
a webpage wasn't safe.

   What's going on now is mostly
new developments. Ad companies want to spy. Webmasters
want money from ads. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook,
Amazon would all like to force everyone to stay in their
walled shopping mall. To that end we had Silverlight aand
Adobe AIR. This stuff has been amplifying, not reducing.

    All browsers are supporting the ability
for script to download updates to the page. Cross site
scripting. Increasing functionality to support ads and
push and location awareness. Virtually all attacks
online require javascript enabled. Often the exploits require
filesharing, remote desktop, or other similar, insecure
network functionality. You can't just blame all that on MS.
Google and Mozilla are both racing to expand the power
of script and speed up the interpreting.

  Now we also have WebAssembly. MS? No. Everyone's
behind it. Mozilla's hot on the bandwagon. Software
in a webpage. Exactly the brainstorm of ActiveX. Both
online companies and their website visitors want this
stuff. No one wants to deal with security. Some people
put their  head in the sand by pretending Linux or Mac
are safe. Some people just figure their credit card company
will take the fall. It hasn't been Microsoft's fault for
about 20 years. If you get attacked online it will almost
certainly be because you enabled script and/or
enabled remote access functions so you could call your
thermostat to tell it you're on your way home.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05