Why Target Internet Explorer when Writing an ActiveX Control?

The primary reasons for the increased prevalence of the Internet should be fairly obvious; however, a point that might not immediately spring to mind is worthy of some consideration when planning. Internet Explorer is based on a component architecture; two of the main components are available for reuse as part of other applications as the WebBrowser control and the Mshtml.dll rendering engine. This means that an increasing number of Microsoft and third-party applications will be using the same underlying control container. Thus, if a control works well in Internet Explorer 4.0 it will also work well in future applications. This component reuse can already be seen in the Internet Explorer suite—Active Desktop and Outlook Express use the same HTML rendering engine that also is the host of ActiveX Controls.