ActiveX browser plugins - what are the pros / cons

From what I can recall, ActiveX components are executable files that conform to some form of standard, that can be distributed on the web and run on IE.

Is ActiveX still an 'active' technology? and if not, why not?

EDIT:

I actually write mostly Silverlight and WPF applications at the moment. I am currently working on a presentation regarding plugin tech开发者_Go百科nologies, so am more interested in ActiveX from a historical perspective.

I suggest you to develop XBAP Application rather than Activex for the following reasons:

• WPF provides more interesting features , and MS do more effort to improve WPF than ActiveX programming.
• XBAP application run under a sandbox it's more secure than ActiveX.

Yes, ActiveX is still ‘active’, but is going down because of a number of reasons:

1. Potential security issues. ActiveX allows execution of native code on the client side and this is the biggest problem. Your personal security depends on control’s vendor.

2. You can use ActiveX only with Internet Explorer. Last few years IE loses its leadership, so ActiveX becomes less available on client side.

3. The progress of cross-browser frameworks: Java, Flash, WPF... Five years ago ActiveX was almost the only choice for implementing heavy client side plug-in. Now there is no such performance difference. At least it is not so significant to sacrifice security.