> who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues.

Flash always was a dumpsterfire, and so were virtually all browser plugins using native code. There's a reason NPAPI was deprecated eventually.

The exception of course is ActiveX. There was no way to ever make that shitshow even reasonably safe, simply given how its execution model was.

It was kind of fun watching adult men say the word "ActiveX" out loud and in earnest though. DCOM with Apartment Threading just didn't have that same "Power Rangers Bad Guy" energy.

From a security perspective, ActiveX is a relic from days long past, when people could be reasonably trusted - an assumption that broke around the early '00s when "dialer" malware offered a first way to extract funds from victims.

From a developer perspective, I'm still sad that it went away. The old COM/OLE/ActiveX ecosystem was flexible to a degree nothing has never ever been since.