Re:Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system
by w1ntermute on Saturday March 23, 2013 @09:29AM
(#5428029)
I'm sure the Chinese government could force the most popular sites to replace ActiveX, but it'll be hard to get to the long tail.
The number of Chinese websites out there with ActiveX dependencies is probably much greater, and you can't really "port" a website. Good luck getting all those Chinese web developers to fix their sites.
If Canonical bundled a web browser that supported ActiveX, that would temporarily resolve the problem (while enabling it to perpetuate), but I'm not sure if Microsoft's licenses even allow a non-IE browser to re-implement ActiveX.
So, I think that not being able to browse many Chinese websites on other platforms is the main thing that keeps Chinese users locked into IE/Windows right now.
Perhaps, though, my knowledge is outdated and ActiveX plugins aren't as ubiquitous in China as they used to be.