Readers: ActiveX sputters out

The key word in predicting ActiveX's demise is not "if" but "when," according to the majority of responses to a NEWS.COM Poll about the technology's future as a Web development tool.

When asked "Does ActiveX have a future as a Web development tool?" almost three-quarters of the respondents scoffed at the possibility of ActiveX living a useful life much longer. Microsoft (MSFT) itself has shied away recently from using the term ActiveX for its overall distributed computing strategy, shining its marketing spotlight instead on COM, its component object model.

Most readers, 72 percent, forebode a gloomy, at best, future for ActiveX, citing shoddy security and the technology's dependency on Windows. "Too slow" and "too complex" were other shortcomings on ActiveX's resume, respondents said.

B.K. DeLong, director of the National Association of Webmasters' New England chapter, didn't think ActiveX has much of a future at all. "I see a lot of Web pages in the course of one day and I have not seen any ActiveX components since it was released in 1996," he said. "As a result of poor marketing and lack of attention to security problems, it has sunk out of the picture."

Andre Ferrer was one of many respondents who lamented being limited to Windows; he also was one of a handful who not only nixed ActiveX's future but maintained that the technology has been doomed from the start.

"How typical of Microsoft...to completely miss the point of Java--platform independence. Like other copycat efforts, this one fails. Not only did the public give ActiveX a lukewarm reception, but the serious security issues pretty much made the technology DOA [dead on arrival]."

The sliver of supporters, 28 percent, who see ActiveX surviving attributed their optimism in large part to Microsoft's success as a marketing mogul. As long as the software giant pumps money and energy into it, ActiveX will be around, believers said.

Advantages of ActiveX, proclaimed by a scant few respondents, included having to download the technology only once instead of every time the component is needed, as in the case of Java; that ActiveX's underlying model, COM, is easier to understand; and simply that old habits die hard.

"ActiveX has a future because COM is easy to understand and spans multiple languages," Eric Rehm said.

While ActiveX may not be best suited for commercial Web chores, it is still a good tool for intranets, one respondent opined.

"Java can do this also, but it's much harder a language and the current run time environments do not perform well enough. VB/C++/ActiveX components do not suffer from this problem," Erik Ohrnberger noted.

For more reader comments, see the next page.