IE Mobile support of ActiveX

iemoblog — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:27:00 GMT

I wanted to get a quick note down into our Blog to help clear some confusion.

Yes, IE Mobile does support ActiveX quite extensively. In fact, the Windows Media Player is an ActiveX control. Adobe Flash is a good example of a 3^rd party ActiveX control.

There are some platform differences that everyone needs to be aware of.

· You can’t run Windows based ActiveX controls on a Windows Mobile devices. (X86 and ARM processors are too dissimilar.)

· So the Windows Mobile ActiveX controls need to be compiled for our platform and the ARM processor.

· Windows Mobile IE Mobile does not support automatic download of ActiveX controls. This was a deliberate decision made to increase device security and to avoid the first point (a X86 version of a control being pushed down to a ARM based device).

There are 2 ways an ActiveX control can get on your device. Both require user interaction.

1. Installing it from a synced desktop

2. Copying a CAB file to the device and installing it locally

Hope this helps!

Dave

Test Lead

IEMobile Team Weblog : X86

IE Mobile support of ActiveX