ActiveX controls and security

David Goldsmith did a very nice review about the issues of ActiveX Controls on security. He made 5 points in his post, but this one is quite important:"They are rarely necessary.  The worst part is, ActiveX controls are often add-ons that no one really needed and wouldn’t miss if they disappeared.  A lot of times that I have seen them used, they were mostly there to make a UI feel more Win32 and less webby.  The risk to benefit ratio has rarely been worth it." He is pretty right about it. I wonder if we are not following the same dark path with Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight.