ACTIVEX

A technology from our friends at Microsoft that links desktop applications to the World Wide Web. Using ActiveX tools, software developers can create interactive Web content for their applications. For example, Word and Excel documents can be viewed directly in a browser if ActiveX is enabled. The biggest downside of ActiveX is that it's almost impossible to have the latest version, considering Microsoft releases a new version just about every day. However, when it does work, it works pretty well.