No, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

Kind of related, it was a COM control you could stretch over your whole desktop, that received push notifications.

Also, I believe it was TOTALLY secure.

Edit: Dang it, I missed where they said "and it made ie the king of browsers." -- Yes, ActiveX

I was 8 when Active Desktop came out -- I used it to put Neopets on the desktop of my computer.

I think they mean Active Server Pages, ie. classical ASP, which you could program using Visual Basic?

ASP was programmed using VBScript (and actually extensible - it used Active Scripting, so you could also do JS, and third parties added support for e.g. Perl). And, since it was server-side tech, and very low-level at that, it didn't care what browser rendered the output.

I think this was a reference to ActiveX. Although most ActiveX controls weren't written in VB, either, even though you could do it - the resulting control was just too large to download, because you had to include ~2 Mb of VB runtime (remember, we're talking about the time back when dialup was still incredibly common - and 2 Mb takes 5 minutes to download on 56k). Mostly it was done in VC++ with ATL.