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

[gebhard dettmar]

On Friday 21 January 2005 01:41, Kai MacTane wrote:
> At 1/20/05 03:45 PM , Almut Behrens wrote:
> >[ ... ]
> >
> >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!"
No doubt
> 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...)
I don't think the Geek attitude in europe differs too much from the US. 
Geeks are geeks
> >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.
Interesting topic. Hope you don't mind my guessing, what they would say:
"From a marketing point of view, of all possible strategies this was the
weirdest/worst: We would loose all people that like our product now, for
those people are concerned about security issues. On the other side we
wouldn't win any MSIE-security-unaware-Windows User. Our strategy to win
them is based upon the fact that security is something no Windows user can
afford to ignore. So no matter how reluctant they are about technical
issues, the first one they will probably care about is security. This will
attract them unevitably to FF. Alternatively: for those who want to use
their computer without knowing much about it, our product is the safe bet.
IE users have to deal with security, FF users not (compared to IE) Think
of what it means to use IE and OE: always checking for Updates (also with
slow connections), always downloading dat-files, telling the SP2-Firewall
not to block port 25 if you want to send an eMail, always performing
Browser-vulnerability tests on heise-online ;-) (for quite a lot of Windows
users this is equivalent to saying: go study computer sciences before you
use our browser. For FF users life is so much easier. So why should we
make it a second IE?
The ActiveX extension is for a special clientel, e.g. company-intranets
that want to share Excel sheets in a browser. They are behind firewalls,
have Sysadmins who know what they are doing (and how to get rid of ActiveX
controls: ActiveXCavator)
But for the shipped version: No IE-features that make us loose all
advantages we are able to offer now that make FF the greatest challenge in
the browser segment"
How you like me as a marketing guy ;-))
gebhard