[Techtalk] why is Active X in web pages evil, but not Perl/PHP/Javascript?

[Kai MacTane]

At 1/20/05 03:45 PM , Almut Behrens wrote:

>OK, thanks for the clarification!  I'm feeling considerably less
>confused, now...

Oh, good.

> > [reads back over the specifically quoted text above] I think I see the
> > problem. When I said "If you really, really *need* ActiveX...", I didn't
> > mean you _personally_.
>
>yes, I really thought you meant _me_...

Sorry about that!

> > [putting ActiveX in Firefox by default]
> > I do agree that some Firefox partisans would push it at any cost... you 
> get
> > people like that in almost any movement. But I don't think many (if 
> any) of
> > them are on the development team, and I think they're a distinct minority.
>
>As I said, I wouldn't mind being wrong here.  What makes me wonder a
>little: when I think about it, the majority of geeks in my immediate
>vicinity kind of hold that (my) view.

Weird. I haven't actually surveyed geeks here in my own area (San 
Francisco), but I'm reasonably confident that they'd all react with stunned 
horror and say something like "Why in the world would anyone *want* to do 
that?!? I think it's a terrible idea!"

I forget where you live - somewhere in Scandinavia? So the attitude of the 
geeks you know may be a peculiarity of your particular country, or of 
Scandinavia in general, or the EU in even-more-general... or the attitudes 
I'm familiar with may be peculiar to the US, or just to the SF Bay Area. 
(Goodness knows this wouldn't be the only example of the US deviating from 
world opinion...)

>Some of them even quit using Firefox for that very reason, and switched 
>back to Standard Mozilla.

Funny. I'd been sticking with standard Mozilla because I enjoyed the 
ability to have precise control over things like cookies, and only recently 
switched to Firefox!

>So, however wrong and subjective that perception may be - it might be
>worth being fed back to Firefox's PR department :)

Indeed. I'm not sure how one would go about doing that, but it certainly 
couldn't hurt.

                                                 --Kai MacTane
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why can't I live a life for me?
  Why should I take the abuse that's served?
  Why can't they see they're just like me?
  I'm not the one that's so absurd!"
                                                 --Ministry,
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