There were always security issues with using ActiveX components for browser plugins. Flash is just the best known and most widespread of them all by a long shot. Unlike something like Javascript, Visual Basic scripting (e.g.) was designed from the onset to be able to execute file system read and write operations throught the Internet Explorer browser particularly. You can make powerful ActiveX objects with VBscript, which along with DBMS was my job specialty back in the early Windows 2000 years.