IT Professionals

ActiveX Needs To Just Cease Existing

Posted by on Feb 5, 2008 | 4 Comments

I have really been trying to not fall into the hype surrounding other browsers and pointing fingers at IE as any browser, Firefox included, has its vulnerabilities. But when your browser supports something as sloppy and dangerous as ActiveX and even to this day, the technology is STILL a hurdle in securing the Windows desktop, something new must be done.

Then we bundle this nonsense with websites like MySpace and Facebook, each full of people willing to click-in-drool their way into all sorts of trouble, you know that more problems are going to arise that in some cases affect us all.

Lately, I have been feeling like MySpace has been forced to be more proactive as Facebook seems to be more concerned about tracking your every move than making sure you are safe and secure when using their service. Yet all of this aside, it is yet again Microsoft’s ActiveX technology that makes a malicious user’s dreams a doable reality. No less evil that any other executable code I suppose, it just seems like ActiveX remains a problem that Microsoft is not able to address. So for the safety of their users, disable it completely by default. That might be one solution.

And this brings me to this today’s question – despite great improvements made to IE7, do you honestly feel secure in using it over lesser targeted browsers like Opera or Firefox? If so, how are you justifying this safe feeling?

  • Paul

    Hey Matt, I can’t use IE7 because it screws up MusicMatch Jukebox, so I’m stuck with IE6. But I don’t care because I use Firefox 99% of the time and I might add with no problems. If I hit a site that says I need active x, I just go on and forget about it. Nothing they had was that important to me. The times when I’ve had to use IE, my anti-virus goes crazy if I’m on line very long. Over the last 4 or 5 months, I think I’ve had 2 or 3 times where the anti-virus had to do anything with Firefox. My only complaint with Firefox is it seems to be getting slower with each update. Hopefully FF 3 will fix that problem. Of course SeaMonkey is really quick!

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/microface/tag/microface/ Steven Leach

    In firefox how do I turn off ActiveX – I have searched the Options tab.

  • http://www.matthartley.com Matt Hartley

    Steven: Actually, you don’t need to – it is not offered with it. ;)
    Here is a solid background for you so you can get a better feel for what this means to Firefox users.

    http://support.mozilla.com/kb/ActiveX

  • http://luem42.com Mark Donaldson

    And yet this webpage uses ActiveX. If ActiveX is so insecure why do we keep using it? Because we don’t have anything else.