"Daniel James"  wrote

| Let me see ... I can write an executable program that I can put into a
| webpage, and when a user visits the webpage my program will run
| natively on their machine with all the rights and privileges of the
| current user ... how could that go wrong?
|

  So you disable all javascript, I presume? Or do you just log
on as a lackey user who has no access to the Internet?

|
| > For years it was a brilliant design. It still is. It's just not
| > safe.
|
| If it's not safe it's not brilliant. Quite the opposite.

   No, not if you understand COM. It allows for
script and other non-compiled code to call compiled
libraries, which are registered on the system. It works
very well. Before .Net, Java, Flash, etc there was COM
providing relatively easy and safe wrapper components.

  I use it a lot in HTAs and sometimes in compiled software.
It's a clever design and allows for standardized function
calls. No functions with 10 parameters where 4 are
callbacks. Mostly it's simple dispatch object model.

    The only problem was that the Internet became
unsafe. When they came out with ActiveX in webpages
that security issue was not foreseen. But COM/ActiveX
is still a brilliant, flexible design today, as long as it's
used offline.

| .. and MS didn't "beat" Netscape, not really. Firefox is still with us
| and it's Chrome that's growing most in market share.
|

  I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and
assume you've been hanging around the barbecue, drinking,
for most of this Labor Day Saturday.

     MS built IE in with Active Desktop
in '98. For a number of years, Macs were all but gone,
IE had over 90% share, Netscape was maintained by
AOL for awhile, if I remember correctly, then was released
as an OSS code base. It was awhile before Firefox got
off the ground. At that time there was no Chrome. You
may not remember it, but around 2000 there was pretty
much just IE on Windows.

  Today, IE/Edge are pretty much kaput, despite that MS
is trying hard to force Chrome/Edge. But Netscape is long,
long gone.

  ActiveX, 2 scripting options, and catering to corporate
sysadmins, as well as building IE into Windows, made
Netscape an impossible proposition. Actually, though, I
switched to Netscape in 2000 and never went back. IE5
was moving like molasses. I couldn't figure out why. That
was always the one big problem with IE: Tying it to
system libraries made it unstable and unpredictable.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05