GROKLAW
Its a sad behavioural trait of many in the IT industry that they need to go out and attack other vendors products just to make theirs look appealing. Firefox is definately the flavour of the month in geek circles at the moment and is a good alternative to IE. Personally I use both fairly regularly. I enjoy the tabbed browsing of Firefox and the performance and integration of Internet Explorer.
Most people, even in the Microsoft space would prefer not to use ActiveX, pretty much everyone is aware of its underlying characteristic which is to execute native code which can open your machine up. This is why so many spyware components are downloadable as ActiveX controls. I’d even bet that there are those on the IE team that would like to perminantly disable the feature altogether.
I think the reason they don’t is that there are a number of intranet applications out there that rely heavily on the feature. Our anti-virus solution at Readify for example uses ActiveX to easily deploy the client application. Windows Update relies on ActiveX and is the first line of defense to users against virus outbreaks and security vulnerabilities.
The problem is that ActiveX makes it too damn easy to protect your machine as it makes it difficult to defend! I wouldn’t give up Windows Update for quids.