While ActiveX is given a warm welcome, PNACL is purposely blocked in Edge Chromium. Google's PNACL is similar to MS ActiveX, but treated by Edge team differently. For Chrome running on Windows, they added a plugin Google Portable Native Client (PNACL), so it can also host apps like Google Earth, which run in a safe sandbox inside the browser. They even designed Chromium OS, which uses Chromium as its UI and supports web applications running in browser window. Google realized long ago that controlling the OS gives infinite advantages to apps efficiency. While ActiveX tech was criticized from all sides, its still in use today - indefinitely long, and brought into Edge Chromium again, for example as IE Mode. Microsoft invented ActiveX decades ago, which allowed to link and embed a window of one application into another (like picture-in-picture). There's always a story behind such news bites. Popular articles don't explain tech behind some phenomena, they just describe it from a user standpoint. Besides IE and Firefox not supporting Google Earth, Vivaldi also doesn't. I just got the impression from other sources that Google Earth only works in Chrome.

Current version of edge