Microsoft Edge Browser to Ditch ActiveX

Microsoft Edge, the browser formally known as Project Spartan to be bundled with Windows 10, will ditch ActiveX and Browser Helper Objects (BHO) in favour of HTML5 and JavaScript. However, the replacement will not appear until after the release of Windows 10 this Summer. Internet Explorer 11 support, which still includes ActiveX and BHO, will remain in place for Enterprise users.

Both ActiveX and BHO are long in the tooth – they were introduced in 1996 and 1997, respectively – and, as such, contain a whole host of security issues that hackers have been exploiting for over a decade. Modern browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Opera had long ago moved away from the frameworks for the standards-based HTML5.

“The need for ActiveX controls has been significantly reduced by HTML5-era capabilities, which also produces interoperable code across browsers,” Microsoft’s blog says of the move, in a section titled ‘Why we don’t need [ActiveX] anymore’. “Microsoft Edge will support native PDF rendering and Adobe Flash as built-in features rather than external add-ons. We recently demonstrated our early work on a modern, HTML/JavaScript-based extension model to provide extensibility beyond what is available with HTML5. We will enable this new model after our initial release of Microsoft Edge this summer and we look forward to sharing more details soon.”

Though Windows 10 will launch with IE11 while Edge is being finished, the browser and its framework are not long for this world. Edge hopes to rival Chrome and Firefox, both for efficiency and security. Microsoft is, eventually, catching up, and it’s about time.

Thank you Computer World for providing us with this information.