Mozilla ActiveX Control

Okay, I came across something today that I have seen before, but haven’t looked at for quite a while now. It is the Mozilla ActiveX Control. Which is pretty nice in and of itself. For those of you familiar with the IE embedded control, which is pretty much used any time a windows application needs to support html content (AOL, HTML Help, Winamp, etc), this is an alternative which uses the Gecko rendering engine (see Firefox).

Of course, this is a Windows centric thing. However, I honestly rarely feel comfortable using IE as an embedded control. Using the IEPatcher tool, you can replace the IE control in your existing programs (see winamp), which can help increase your security profile.

From a programming standpoint, however, life in windows development has moved on to the .Net framework. One down side to the control, is there isn’t a merge module (.msm) available for inclusion in MSI based installers. Meaning use of Visual Studio’s package and deployment projects are more difficult. There is also no quiet install option, meaning you have to rely on the user installing the package separately from your application.

Regardless of these issues, it’s a highly cool thing, and a welcome addition to anyone’s toolkit. Going a step farther, you can use this as a base for creating stand-alone XUL based applications.
[tags]Programming, Mozilla, Firefox, ActiveX, IE[/tags]