ActiveX broadly refers to Microsoft's entire COM architecture, but is now commonly used to refer to ActiveX controls implemented based on standard COM interfaces for object linking and embedding. These controls, with the OCX extension, evolved from VBX and were designed for Microsoft's Internet Explorer. By defining interface specifications between containers and components, a control written following the specification can be easily used in multiple containers without modifying the code. Similarly, a container that follows the specification can easily embed any compliant control through standard interface calls. Due to the widespread use of OLE in ActiveX controls, only a few OLE technologies remain independent of ActiveX, such as compound documents.
Some browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, support ActiveX controls to varying degrees. This allows webpages to interact with controls via scripts, creating richer effects but also posing security issues. Internet Explorer and some other applications also support the ActiveX Documents interface, allowing one application to embed another that supports this specification. Many applications, such as Microsoft's Office suite and Adobe's Acrobat Reader, implement this specification.
Server-side ActiveX components generally refer to components running within service processes. A typical application is ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) created by ASP scripts running in IIS.
Many development tools on the market support the development and use of ActiveX controls.
ActiveX Documents refer to documents using ActiveX technology as the interface, which began around 2000. At that time, due to the rise of the internet, Microsoft, then a software giant, employed a strategy to counter the emerging Netscape browser. The market was in a weak position for IE, so Microsoft aimed to integrate its dominant Office documents into IE to outperform Netscape. This strategy allowed IE to read and even edit Office documents without converting them into standard HTML pages. Therefore, after 2000, IE provided direct support for opening ActiveX Documents (e.g., .doc, .ppt files). This strategy successfully pushed Netscape out of the market within a few years. Since only Microsoft could interpret Office documents, later browsers like Google's Chrome could not directly open files like PPT or DOC. However, with the advent of cloud computing, this situation is likely to change.
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