ActiveX: Safari does not support

ActiveX is a proprietary Microsoft technology that only works in Windows. Your only choices are to install VirtualPC & Windows on a Mac or to use a pc.

Not only does it only work on Windows, it also only works in Internet Explorer on Windows. I can't tell you how many times in my web development class they've said, "This is how you do things in every browser on every platform... except in Internet Explorer on Windows you use this ActiveX component..." Any site that is designed to use ActiveX components is designed to ignore about 20% of internet users.

KatherineB,

Only IE supports ActiveX. No other browser, with the exception of Mozilla (PC) that is attempting to add an ActiveX plug-in, supports ActiveX. Shame on your University for not being considerate and for not acknowledging that not everyone is an IE and a PC clone.

Patrick

I'm just hoping that they don't redo WebCT (which has just merged with Blackboard) to use ActiveX. Maybe it will work in the other direction and they will strip ActiveX from Blackboard. One can hope.

Yeah, my institution uses "blackboard". I'm don't care much for it. It works for Safari. I think it uses ActiveX in a few instances. For example, it lets you open Word documents or Powerpoint presentation from within the browser.

Those features aren't terribly useful. In my opinion it's quite messy and cumbersome. When I'm using the Windows machines at school, I just download the .doc or .ppt file locally and open them through the actual application. It's a lot more cleaner.

I don't know if you're missing out on more important Active X based functions. But as far as I"m concerned you're not missing much. I would bother the IT department about not using Active X and how it's a potential avenue for malware. Even Microsoft is planning to have Active X shut-off by default in IE 7 and they are already moving away from it towards stuff like .NET.

Remember Katherine,

ActiveX opens up Windows to security issues. Last numbers I saw being touted around had total Windows viruses at over 97,000. Number of Mac OS X viruses Zero, there are many reasons for this, one of which is the default security build into OS X and Safari.

I know it bites, we had to implement Blackboard at our university, but my section was tied in under the Marketing Dept so we all had Macs. Luckily I had a PC I used for browser compatibility checking so I could do Blackboard work on that.

The next worst offender outside of the university system is the real estate multiple listing service. Some tard wanted a really cool looking menu that they couldn't do in java so they wrote an ActiveX control so the web page is a mixture of menus in html/java, and the ActiveX menu so now it won't run on anything but IE in Windows. Of course you could fill out the data in the forms to perform a search without ActiveX but the tard also put the submit button on the ActiveX control leaving everyone SOL.

I keep VPC on the system for emergency use which is still rather rare. Last time I brought up Windows under VPC was about 3 weeks ago.

Jan J.