How to Enable ActiveX in Chrome?

Question

I read that early builds of Chrome supported ActiveX, but was later restricted to certain MIME types (for support for say Windows Media Player). I then read Google was going to enable ActiveX strictly for the Korean market. How do I (re)enable this in Chrome?

Our web based product relies on ActiveX controls from 3rd parties to play custom video. This limits us to IE. We'd love to support Chrome also, but find it impossible w/o ActiveX support.

Answer 1

There is a proprietary plugin called "Neptune" which says that it will allow you to use IE Tab functionality in Chrome on Windows.

Meadroid do this because they have ActiveX controls which they have written and they want them to be able to work in any browser, and they explicitly mention Chrome in the list of supported browsers for enabling ActiveX with this.

There is also a modified version of Chrome, called ChromePlus, which includes IETab, among other extra features.

I've not used either of these personally, but they look like they'll do what you want. I'd be interested to hear if they work out for you, as I know of other people who want to be able to use IEtab in Chrome :)

Answer 2

anyone who says activex is less secure then NPAPI is crazy. They both allow the exact same access. Yes I've written both. The only reason people think activeX is insecure is because 10+ years ago IE had default settings that allowed a remote site to auto download the plugin.

Answer 3

maybe this new Chrome extension helps:

ActiveX for Chrome https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/lgllffgicojgllpmdbemgglaponefajn/

Answer 4

This could be pretty ugly, but doesn't Chrome use the NPAPI for plugins like Safari? In that case, you could write a wrapper plugin with the NPAPI that made the appropriate ActiveX creation and calls to run the plugin. If you do a lot of scripting against those plugins, you might have to be a bit of work to proxy those calls through to the wrapped ActiveX control.

Answer 5

I'm not an expert but it sounds to me that this is something you could only do if you built the browser yourself - ie, not something done in a web page. I'm not sure that the sources for Chrome are publicly available (I think they are though), but the sources are what you'd probably need to change for this.

Answer 6

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Does_Google_Chrome_support_ActiveX

Google Chrome comes with an ActiveX shim, as part of its default plugin array. So Google Chrome features at least partial support for ActiveX controls (as do many non-Internet Explorer browsers). I can't find information as to whether or not this includes support for ActiveX security certificates or the like, nor if/where such plugins can be controlled, within the browser.

..... Note that to enable the plug-in you must run Chrome with the following switch " --allow-all-activex" So in shortcut that is used to start up Chrome, add this after "Chrome.exe"

Answer 7

Chrome currently supports only a small subset of ActiveX components entirely on purpose, and it's never going to support them all, and especially lots of random 3rd party propriety ones.

Why?

Because ActiveX is a mess - it's a huge security hole and all the components can run at a higher security level than the browser.

That means that if you let in an ActiveX component it owns your PC - and while many are not malign most are resource hogs. Also if a malign site can't hack your browser it might still be able to hack one of its ActiveXs.

This is completely against Chrome's sandbox everything and wall off every tab approach - the reason why Chrome is by far the quickest, most secure and most stable browser is the same reason that it currently only supports Flash, Silverlight and one or two more.

However, it sounds like you're not really developing a web application anyway - your site in IE is basically a portal to downloading further ActiveX-based applications. Why worry about supporting anything that your DVR clients with their coding teams writing ActiveXs don't?

Answer 8

I downloaded this "IE Tab Multi" from Chrome. It works good! http://iblogbox.com/chrome/ietab/alert.php