Once again, I wonder how misguided the IE team is. In this clip I have highlighted below, Rob Franco states:
IEBlog : Security strategy for IE7: Beta 1 overview, Beta 2 preview
Powerful add-ons like ActiveX controls are part of what make browsing such a rich experience but any extensibility can also introduce threats to browser security.
It is the first part I take issue with. It is NOT ActiveX controls that make browsing a rich experience. It is the great web standards that we have (ie CSS and Javascript…). I use Firefox exclusivly, I dont use ActiveX and sites like Google Maps and others seem pretty rich to me. Point being that I think that they need to focus on making IE standards complient, and secure.
Now that second part of that sentence, I do agree with.