Does ASP.NET require ActiveX or not?

Question

Does Asp.Net require ActiveX to make Ajax calls? I suspect it does because without setting "initialize and script activeX controls not marked as safe" in IE options ASP.NET UpdatePanels don't work. Am I correct?

A very important edit here

I haven't had any doubts about IE6 really. But I was able to reproduce this even on IE8 (Windows 7). Try setting IE security level to high. After that you will have to set:

• Initialize and script activeX controls not marked as safe
• Submit non-encrypted form data
• Active scripting

to be able to use Asp.NET UpdatePanel. The later two are OK, but the first one... I remind you this is IE8

Answer 1

You are getting this error because the scripts access the XMLHttpRequest object (for the AJAX requests), which was implemented via ActiveX in early versions of IE.

Because it's even checking for it, you get this alert. No it's not required for ASP.Net, but you may have issues with partial postbacks in early versions of IE if it's disabled.

Answer 2

No, it doesn't.

Answer 3

ActiveX and AJAX are completely unrelated. ActiveX is a mechanism to allow full-trust apps to be delivered over the web. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XHTML, which is a way to update areas of a webpage without posting the whole thing back to the server.

Answer 4

Ajax uses the XMLHTTPRequest object.

Before IE 7 IE used to implement this object using ActiveX.

Firefox, Safari etc implement this as a native object. Since IE7 the XMLHTTPRequest object is exposed as a native scripting object.

The activeX issue is a browser issue rather than an asp.net issue. So the answer is no.