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#1 2008-03-20 1:37 pm
Ajax and IE - ActiveX
I know a lot of people turn off ActiveX in their browsers or are afraid to let sites use it because of security issues. All of the tutorials I've found for Ajax rely on ActiveX for IE browsers. Is there an easy way to get around this?
MacBook Pro 15.4"
2.5GHz CPU, 250GB HDD, 512MB VRAM
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#2 2008-03-20 5:34 pm
Re: Ajax and IE - ActiveX
Find better tutorials—IE7 supports native XMLHttpRequest. If you have to support IE6, no, there's no way around it, save using hidden IFRAMEs (it's ugly; this can help).
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#3 2008-03-24 11:38 pm
- Aqua OS X
- Shark Sandwich
- From: Oakland, CA
- Registered: 2000-06-05
- Posts: 12462
Re: Ajax and IE - ActiveX
I don't know what you're reading, but "Ajax" has nothing to do with Active X. It's JavaScript and XML. Those are the two things you'll want to learn about 
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#5 2008-04-04 3:24 pm
- HackerJax
- Previous Poster
- From: *unknown*
- Registered: 2002-07-13
- Posts: 4871
Re: Ajax and IE - ActiveX
PHUSMC wrote:
IE 6 and below require you to use an Active X control to use the xmlhttprequest
Thats OK, its installed on any up-to-date Windows system as it ships with the XML Parser thats embedded into Windows.
You should never have to 'push' an activex control to a Windows machine to perform xml http requests, unless you are planning on using some 3rd party XMLHTTPRequest object (I haven't even seen any available).
If the user has IE 5+ they should be good to go.
There is a lot of confusion around ActiveX and Windows/IE. ActiveX is simply a COM component that can be initialized and used from within IE, sure you can make an ActiveX component that is downloadable, but the majority of ActiveX controls you'll use within IE are already in the Windows OS. You aren't introducing any *new* security vulnerabilities when you use them.
ActiveX got a bad rap due to the myrid of malware authors who wrote spyware as IE plugins using ActiveX as the interface to the browser, it probably didn't help that MS was pretty lax on permissions for installing ActiveX components in the past.
Last edited by HackerJax (2008-04-04 3:33 pm)
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