...problem is that many large companies
have internal systems that were written back when Microsoft pushed ActiveX as
the solution...
Actually, if these companies had written their internal system software as a
big ActiveX component, they wouldn't have this problem. ActiveX is (as far
as IE's concerned) simply a plugin architecture. Note that the Flash
plugin for IE (an ActiveX control) works the same in IE6-IE8.
The problem with ActiveX is that it's just not an appropriate plugin
technology for browsers. It has no inherent sandboxing capabilities;
there's no way to differentiate between a browser plugin and any other ActiveX
control; and Windows comes with several ActiveX controls that should never be
allowed to be used in a browser (FileSystemObject, anyone)? For what it
was designed for -- resuable components for desktop applications -- it's great,
but MS should have put a little more thought into what they were unleashing when
they decided to make ActiveX the plugin standard for IE. And no, I don't
count "signed" and "marked safe for scripting" features as thought.
No, the problem is that these business systems were all put together using
HTML/CSS content that was only ever written for, or tested with, IE.
Companies that needed these systems took their bizapps people and told 'em to
"make a web version". As is typical with internal apps, they were written
to meet the company's needs as quickly and cheaply as possible; which means
"works in our current environment", not "is ready for the future". Add in
years of ad-hoc tweaks, changes, subsystem additions, and you've got a crufty
piece of web tech that barely works in the originally spec'ed envrionment.
Asking for cross-browser/web standards output from a bunch of stuff written
by programmers who:
- Are used to working with client-side/Winforms VB or C# .Net (or VB6) and SQL
Server/MS Access databases for their bizapps
- Who may or may not be any good at their jobs
- Who may not be the same people who originally wrote the code
- Who were told to pick "fast and cheap" as the two out of three (fast,
cheap, good)
- Who were told all of this 10 years ago
is optimistic, at best.