Using
ActiveXObject
is not just the "old way". This is
absolutely unacceptable way, especially in your case, proprietary to Microsoft and extremely unsafe. Actually, for the safety-savvy users, seeing such construct in your JavaScript would be a good reason to put your site in a black list and never visit it again.
Let me ask you, why would you tag your post with jQuery if you don't use jQuery at all? The documentation on jQeury Ajax is quite clear, please use it:
http://api.jquery.com/jquery.ajax[
^].
—SA