ActiveXObject was never a standard, it was a gaping set of security holes waiting to be exploited and closing both it and Netscape plugins were two of the best

ActiveXObject was never a standard, it was a gaping set of security holes waiting to be exploited and closing both it and Netscape plugins were two of the best decisions made. Beyond that, other than different measures that have been in test, and not standardized, I'm not familiar with much that has been deprecated in the nearly three decades of browsers and JS, that's a massively solid track record. Aside, as cool as aspects of being able to write a component in VB6 and use it in a browser was, it still had some very painful aspects. Silverlight could have done better than it did, as could other package formats. If something similar to Silverlight or Flash was made using more open standards, such as with SVG + scripts + a manifest in a package, it could have been browser integrated... It's still possible and even more likely today in concert with WASM.