ActiveX Control/Plug-In

[Fast Learner]

About half the time I surf ENWorld I use an old Pentium 400 on a wireless laptop. Because the little guy only has 64mb, I changed my security settings so that it wouldn't run ActiveX controls or any other plug-ins by default, but will instead ask me. This helps a ton when surfing pages (on other sites) that want to run like 3 Flash ads, something that drags my baby down considerably.

This is all well and good, and I'm reasonably satisfied with the situation. I'm curious, though, why every page of ENWorld asks to use an ActiveX control or plug in. What is this control and what does it do? It's clearly not an ad, since I get the same ads whether I accept or not. I thought it might have something to do with some of the nifty Javascript features (like the collapsing menus, user sub-menu, topic rollovers, etc.), but things seem to run the same whether I allow the download or not.

So what does it do? Why am I clicking "No" for every page in the site?

 

[Michael Morris]

To my knowledge the site has no Active X controls unless you turn the enhanced editor on.

 

[Fast Learner]

If you set IE to High security, you'l get the same request.

I just scanned through the source and my guess is that it's this bit:

progidXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(grayscale=1)

Which would be a bit of an outside "plug-in" that could in theory be a security risk (I understand that it's not -- I just mean from IE's point of view). Guess I should have take a look at the source to start with.

(The only other remote possibility is the PNG vBulletin adds at the bottom of the page, though I'd consider it much less likely.)