Remove ActiveX from LibreOffice

I missed a couple of posts being off list, and some from Gerrit comments. >(1)And the cost of maintaining it is currently near zero, no? I don't think so, it's likely more of a maintenance cost than NPAPI was. I'm not an expert but it makes our Windows builds more complex. >(2)As Michael accurately noted, ActiveX is for more than browser embedding. >It's a generic framework for cross-language modules, which IE simply >capitalized on. >From my admittedly limited understanding (I'm much more a Linux dev) users can still use the more modern Active Template Library [3] to accomplish the same goal. I purposely didn't try to remove any of this support. To look at this issue from another POV.. If someone showed up today with an issue with a LO ActiveX control embedded in their application that didn't work - what would our response be? It's an outdated technology that we're not investing in. >My position on ActiveX is to leave it (lest we break applications in the > wild,) and to *announce its deprecation* with two goals: first, solicit the > feedback of LO ActiveX consumers and, if so inclined to continue using it, > help in its support. And second, to flag a date in the future when ActiveX > will be completely removed from LO codebase, pending sufficient reason and > support by its consumers. I'm happy with this. I'd say a quicker timeframe is fine though. >From the announce, if no one has found an application that uses LO-embedded ActiveX remove it in a month or something. I expect that if there are some users they might not hear until the install the version without it regardless of what we do. Kind regards, Bryan [1] https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/21024/ [2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2016-January/071789.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Template_Library On Wed, Dec 30, 2015 at 3:02 PM, Bryan Quigley <gquigs at gmail.com> wrote: > Hi there, > > Recently it was decided to remove the rest of NPAPI support [1] which > got me thinking about the other Windows specific plugin tech - > ActiveX. > > It seems ActiveX is very much no longer recommended by Microsoft and > it seems to not work by default for IE10/11 on Windows 7 and up. Any > objections to removing? > > AFAICT this would just be removing embedding LO into IE. > > Kind regards, > Bryan > > [1] https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/20658/ and ESC discussion > here: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2015-December/071504.html > [2] https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/05/06/a-break-from-the-past-part-2-saying-goodbye-to-activex-vbscript-attachevent/