Guest post by The Korean government has finally announced its plans to start removing the troublesome ActiveX software from public websites later this month in order to create a more user-friendly Internet environment.For long, this tech-savvy country has been stuck in a time warp with its slavish dependence on Internet Explorer.
ActiveX is an ancient piece of technology that is still prominent in South Korea. It has its multiple problems that sometimes bring down the whole banking system or the public service system every year. The good news is that it will finally be over according to this news.
Is it such a big problem to make plugins working in different browsers and OSes via ActiveX, NPAPI and PPAPI, respectivelly? Sun Java did it, Adobe Flash and Shockwave did it, Wolfram CDF player did it, Microsoft Silverlight did it. Why do they talk about removing ActiveX as opposed to adding NPAPI and PPAPI?
Or more like remove the use of plugins all together as it should be. The year is 2015 not 2001. Get rid of this crap. Plugins are just a major hindrance to wide spread compatibility and access to web sites.
Both computer hardware and software capabilities are powerful enough to abandon plugins, at least for native web site content and functionality. The required parts are alreday parts of the web browser and can also be controlled by the web browser’s configuration tools.
Just imagine: In order to display a JPEG image, you’d need a proprietary plugin supplied by a (of course profit-oriented) company. You don’t get any source code, so nobody has an idea what it really does, except the obvious. And if it works, no debugging is possible. The company of course only supports one operating system as “1st class citizen”, all other operating system plugins are lacking functionality. And for some operating systems, there actually isn’t a plugin available.
And of course you need many of such plugins for a “modern” web experience: one for JPEG images, a different one for PNGs. Of course visiting hyperlinks also requires plugins. And displaying justified text, too. There’s rumour they’ll support centered text next year, but only if you use the latest version of the MightyCorp <p> plugin. 🙂
Shouldn’t we be able to use today’s web content like video and audio in the same way we use “yesterday’s web content” like text and images? For example, Opera has a nice button for switching off CSS – this makes some webpages readable. The HTML content is being rendered with sane defaults. A different click lets you turn off images, and turn them back on if needed. “Handlers” for multimedia content should act the same. You don’t want to have annoying videos on autoplay? Visit the browser’s configuration and switch them off. No need for additional codecs or 3rd party plugins – all the required stuff is already in the browser. This idea would benefit compatibility and interoperability of web pages (what a scary statement!) across operating systems and devices.
I actually have no idea why this isn’t reality yet, now, in 2015…
I just doublechecked the settings for Internet Explorer and Chrome and both basically allow what you want. The options for doing this have been there since as long as I can remember
If you can run Unreal Tournament without plugins you can run your bank website without plugins.
Fergy,
They took that down years ago and I never got to try it. The majority of HTML5 games I’ve tried still perform poorly compared to native. Maybe I need a hardware upgrade to handle them better.
Never the less, I’m with you about getting rid of plugins. I hate ActiveX with a passion, and flash isn’t much better. I definitely prefer websites to not require plugins, but unfortunately it’s not always possible for me to avoid them. Many embedded devices require java. My car insurance company requires the adobe reader browser plugin. Mind you I have the foxit PDF reader and download PDFs all the time, but this website specifically requires the adobe reader browser plugin. They just figure everyone has it.
I agree in general, web browsers have made huge advances that made certain external functionality irrelvant.
It shows where browser vendors put their resources into, but the two things are unforuntately not comparable.
For the game context it is mostly about graphics, maybe input, for the banking case it is often crypography.
While browsers have gained lots of functionality on the first account, e.g. WenbGL, there is no cross-browser API yet that allows access to system crypto systems, e.g. card readers.
Well, that really is good news for Korea… I’ve been here since 2003 and everyone who doesn’t want to use IE is probably unable to do banking online due to everything being programmed for IE or Windoze and doing it online with banks elsewhere (i.e. in other countries, like my native England) is actually easier. They don’t seem to have these nutty ActiveX-related problems…
It’s unfortunate that this kind of lock-in is still prevalent . . . be great if you could do something similar with Korean cell phone, i.e. be able to remove Korean phone crapware foisted on you by the major phone companies.
Question is, if ActiveX goes the way of all things, will there be widespread benefits? Hope so… as we keep saying to each other out here: “This is Korea!”
The root of the problem is the government mandate for everyone creating/using their own private key. That’s has NOT been changed. I won’t be surprised if ActiveX plugin model would be only replaced with a DIFFERENT (possibly worse) technology. Note that businesses have to pay security companies for creating their private keys, which is ridiculous. I don’t see that situation is changing, yet.
To make it even more odd there has never been regulation though on mobile apps. But for the desktop things are horrible.
My wife purchased a brand new notebook last year but after spending the day installing all the required things to visit 3 websites (two were for banking and one was for stocks) the notebook is now almost completely worthless to use. It now has a total of 4 virus scans running at the same thing among encryption software needed for these sites (you can not access any of these sites without installing and running these). On top of that the website needs to be completely setup for Korean (just having Korean fonts isn’t enough, because then some ActiveX windows won’t show up correctly i.e. system locale for non-Unicode programs). Meaning I can’t even help her setup a printer without spending an hour trying to read and understand the Korean slowly.