What About ActiveX?

If you’re already quite familiar with Microsoft’s JScript, you might be thinking “but JavaScript can do some of these things using ActiveX,” and that’s true—but ActiveX is not part of ECMAScript. ActiveX is a Windowsspecific mechanism for allowing Internet Explorer to access COM (the Component Object Model at the heart of Windows scripting technology) and generally only runs in trusted environments, such as an intranet. There are some specific exceptions we’ll come across—examples of ActiveX controls that run without special security in IE (such as the Flash plugin, and XMLHttpRequest)—but for the most part, scripting using ActiveX is outside the scope of this book.