In a noteworthy example, a certificate for Microsoft was mistakenly issued to an unknown individual, who had successfully posed as Microsoft to the CA contracted to maintain the ActiveX 'publisher certificate' system (VeriSign).
Levien received the Microsoft Chairman's Award from Bill Gates in 1990 for his work on applications architecture and the foundations of ActiveX.
However, web page agents are only compatible with Internet Explorer, since alternative browsers like Opera or Mozilla Firefox do not support ActiveX.
UAG performs particularly well in providing a portal for web applications, such as web-based email and intranets, but it also provides full SSL VPN network access using either ActiveX (when using Internet Explorer) or Java components (when using Firefox, Opera, non Windows client such as Red Hat or Mac OS).
It is therefore advisable to visit these sites only when Java, ActiveX and JavaScript as well as other scripting languages have been disabled in the browser and the system is fully patched.