Remove ActiveX from LibreOffice

[Bryan Quigley]

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  It's an outdated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/