How to detect ActiveX controls in IE 8/9/10 without having to instantiate ActiveXObject

Question

Is it possible to detect which ActiveX controls are active in IE 8/9/10 using JavaScript (or some other technology - possibly Java?), in a way that is more extensible and dynamic than attempting to instantiate a specific ActiveX object around a try-catch block? So far, this appears to be the only way to achieve this solution, but this solution is not extensible and would require much additional code maintenance when newer ActiveX plugins are released.

It would be nice to be able to detect plugins similar in a way that JS does with the navigator.plugins array, but as far as I can tell, there is no comparable way to do this for ActiveX controls.

Answer 1

You could probably create an activex control that had the ability to detect the presence of other activex controls, but IE does not expose any API to do this for you.

Catch-22.