To understand Adobe Flash Player ActiveX, you must first understand the architecture of trust in the late 1990s. It was a different internet then—a collection of walled gardens and dial-up whispers—and the browser was merely a window, a thin pane of glass through which you viewed static HTML.

While standard "Flash Player" refers to the general runtime, is a framework developed by Microsoft that allows software components to interact with one another within the Windows environment.

Flash Player Activex !full! — Adobe