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I am having an application written developed in asp classic. and with rich use of ActiveX controls. Right away it is only IE supported. But we are moving towards cross browsing platform.

As we all know Microsoft Edge is coming up and it is ending up the support for ActiveX as well as Other browsers like chrome,Firefox are ending up support for NPAPI And other plugins.

http://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/05/06/a-break-from-the-past-part-2-saying-goodbye-to-activex-vbscript-attachevent/

So Is there any alternative is given for that ActiveX controls to access or integration of hardware and also any plugins for cross Browsing ?

Help would be much Appreciated. Thanks.

Haider
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    HTML5 is supposed to largely negate the need for plugins like ActiveX, Flash, Java applets etc. You mention Classic ASP, which essentially uses ActiveX server side. Windows servers will continue to support Classic ASP for the forseeable future. – John Feb 17 '16 at 15:08
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    @John Same thoughts just not clear from the question if the OP is speaking about client or server side ActiveX controls. If it's client ActiveX to access hardware then they are out of luck. My advice don't upgrade until you can build other mechanisms to interact with the hardware. – user692942 Feb 17 '16 at 15:38
  • Thanks for the replies ! – Haider Feb 18 '16 at 08:02
  • Actually this was my question, is there any other mechanism available to interact with the hardware.? Also as i Said Application is in asp classic and right away its only IE dependent and we are going for cross browsers and for that purpose we are converting our VB scripts to JQuert, JS and HTML5. – Haider Feb 18 '16 at 08:11
  • Is [FireBreath](http://www.firebreath.org/) can be a solution? – Haider Feb 18 '16 at 10:26
  • FireBreath 2 has support for Native Messaging, which provides a way to do this on Chrome and will on FireFox when they drop NPAPI support, but I don't know of a technology that can be used on Edge. If I ever find one I'll try to add support for it in FireBreath 2. – taxilian Feb 18 '16 at 23:50
  • Thanks @taxilian I just added [Firebreath](http://www.firebreath.org/) to involve you in the discussion. :P Can you please tell me have you guys tried to manage ActiveX controls? for Microsoft Edge? I mean any alternatives for that? Basically I had an application that is interacting with the hardware machines through activeX. So is there any replacements? – Haider Feb 19 '16 at 05:44
  • As I just said, I don't know *any* options to provide what you want with Microsoft Edge. – taxilian Feb 19 '16 at 07:21
  • okay what if we talk about chrome/ firefox? is it possible to interact with hardware through them? – Haider Feb 19 '16 at 10:17
  • Edge hasn't replaced IE on Win10. IE is still there if you want it. See this https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/08/26/how-microsoft-edge-and-internet-explorer-11-on-windows-10-work-better-together-in-the-enterprise/ – John Feb 19 '16 at 10:30
  • Also, your comment "as I said application is in asp classic and right away its only IE dependent", suggests that you may still not be clear about the distinction between client side and server side. If you're using Classic ASP it's the server which executes the VBScript, not the browser. Using server side code might be an option, particularly if you're on an intranet and your server is also a machine in your local network – John Feb 19 '16 at 10:57
  • Yes that is correct its server sided. But one more thing we are converting VBScripts to JS & JQuery to move towards cross browsers. So that is why I need help to communicate with hardware that was done by ActiveX before. But now as its support is gonna end up so What could be its replacement? – Haider Feb 19 '16 at 12:30
  • Again, as I said in my earlier comment, in Chrome you can use Native Messaging and on firefox they currently still support NPAPI, but sometime before they drop NPAPI you will be able to use native messaging. FireBreath 2 has support for all three (NPAPI, ActiveX, and Native Messaging) built in, but it is not well documented because nobody I've helped through it has documented it yet. – taxilian Feb 20 '16 at 17:04
  • Thank @taxilian for your replies. Last question are there any working sample codes available for FireBreath 2? – Haider Mar 03 '16 at 09:18
  • Also @John our ActiveX controls are basically client sided controls. not server sided. – Haider Mar 03 '16 at 09:18
  • There are working examples in the project, but nobody has documented how to make them work on Chrome yet; you'd have to dig through IRC logs and google groups messages to find it. – taxilian Mar 03 '16 at 15:17
  • @taxilian Is this only limited to chrome? or will it help out to work for every browser i-e edge , firefox , safari? talking about firebreath. – Haider Mar 14 '16 at 13:51
  • Currently there are no solutions that I know of for edge. Firefox still supports NPAPI and has indicated that they will add support for native messaging before they remove support for NPAPI, so it should work fine there as well. Beyond that, I don't know. – taxilian Mar 14 '16 at 17:26
  • @Haider Just checking if you have got a resolution for your problem? I am also stuck in the same situation as you and looking forward to solving it. Can you please provide me some insight here. – Gaurav Jan 10 '21 at 15:37

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IE11 will still support ActiveX. You can use the Enterprise Mode site list so that the web sites or app will start in Edge and then automatically open using Internet Explorer 11. Edge and IE 11 are both available on Windows 10, with Edge is the default browser. Additionally, if you know that your intranet sites aren't going to work properly with Microsoft Edge, you can set all intranet sites to automatically open using IE11.

Here is the detail: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt270205.aspx

Doris Chen
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    Yes I have go through that @Doris But the problem is we are moving our application to cross browsers so we need one solution for all of the browsers. – Haider Mar 03 '16 at 09:19