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New IE Disables Netscape-style Plug-ins
Snibor Eoj writes: "In his latest column, Robert Cringely takes a look at Microsoft's motivation for disabling Netscape API plug-ins in IE. As always with Cringely, it's an interesting take on things. We'll see how this one turns out..." Among other things, this will disable Quicktime plugins.
Alright, we know from the article that Quicktime is out for sure.
:)
But won't removing also kill Flash, one of the few Internet-wide plugins that I can be pretty sure these days that the majority of the visitors to my website can see? If that happens, a whole lot of site designers will sure be peeved.
Course, that will include every media company and such.
However, it would help me get away from those cutesy webpages I see sometimes that keep on playing annoying loops of midi quality music and disable the controls too (and which takes it's own pleasant time to load on my 56k)
Obviously, we'll get a slew of complaints concerning anti-trust allegations and such. Yet here's my question: should intercompatibility and interoperability be mandatory in software when they aren't in the rest of market law?
Also, isn't this motivation for a new standard in web browsing? We have one for the languages of the web, and for the content. Yet we don't have one for the viewer or plugins. If there were a standard, such as in CD players or other infrastructure, then we would have a reason to be upset when someone deviates from the standard. As it is, the businesses devise their own standards, for good and bad.
Pax Digitalia
Sure it is a hassle, but Windows or Microsoft per say has an API they're trying to get developers to follow. Netscape a few weeks ago if you don't remember basically said "We are out of the browser Business" so what is the use of supporting the api of a dead browser? Especially one that is based on Mozilla which isn't even a 1.0 product yet?
Sure netscape 6.1 amd mozilla browsers are getting there, but not quite there yet and maybe in IE 6.01 ot 6.1 you will see it back in or an optional download
Finally Microsoft is trimming some bloat, and all we have to do is complain or bring up things that aren't even relevant (like monopolistic practices, what in the hell does that have to do with supporting a dead products plugins?)
Again, just my opinion.
I'm talking about this.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
This was the first time I'd heard of the Eolas patent. Sounds like another company that's looking to get rich off of patents instead of, you know, creating any sort of useful product. (If you go to their web site, it seems to be little more than information about their lawsuit.) If I were Microsoft, I'd probably do the same thing, just to piss them off. But I'm petty and vindictive that way.
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
OK, the more I hear about XP, the less I like. I don't see myself buying XP anytime soon, and that's a shame because I was looking forward to continuing to use all my Windows apps on the latest and greatest hardware with the latest and greatest software.
This reminds me a lot of Netscape. Netscape peaked with 3.x of their browser. I seem to remember using it for what seemed like an eternity until IE 4.x, and the only reason I switched to IE was because OE was so much better than Eudora and Netscape Mail.
I think MS may have peaked with Windows98. From this point forward, it could be all down hill. The only question is what will replace Windows? Sorry guys, I just don't see Linux doing it for me. I could however, be easily persuaded to switch to OS-X if it were available for x86. I would even pay $200 for an x86 OS-X if I thought it had the staying power that Windows has had. Maybe Palm will keep going with Desktop Be, but that doesn't have the huge app base that a *NIX based OS does, and quite frankly I'm reluctant to go with any small market "alternative" OS.
I'm seeing a lot of disinformation here about the plugin API. It is currently possible to write a plugin DLL that will work with both Netscape Navigator and IE. There are a few places where the two browsers do things differently, but the intersection of functionality is sufficient to make writing compatable plugins a reasonable thing to do. So, at the very least it will still be possible to use most of your plugins with Netscape, and developers of IE plugins will just have to tweak their code a little bit, unless they were stupid enough to commit to features not supported by Netscape.
So, what will my solution be? Probably not to abandon Windows. I may actually haul out my old Netscape CD and install it. Who knows, the Mozilla project could actually get a big shot in the arm from this. I think MS is seriously shooting themselves in the foot with this... I mean, they've got me re-thinking Mozilla now, and if you had asked me about it yesterday I would have said something like "why would I want to run that? IE is so more stable".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Maybe this will make IE more stable. Personally I wish they'd get rid of the ActiveX plugins too. I'm so damn sick of it opening Word and PDF document IN the browser when I'd rather download them or at least spawn the actual application they were meant for.
Negative.
BackOrfice ButtPlugs are still quite supported; however due to the raw sockets, they are more uncomfortable than they used to be under Windows 9x/ME
Apparently most offending plugins can be rewritten to use ActiveX (which still violates the patent but remains supported?) For Java this means that not only is Java no longer included by default on Windows systems, but the plugin used for adding Java capabilities is (probably) no longer compatible with IE at all. Just as it appeared that most people would be happy having Sun's version of Java widely available as a plugin instead of MS's corrupted version, MS has thrown another wrench in the plans.
.NET and breaks compatibility with everyone else. We really do need a standard cheap way to make universally acceptable plugins/embedded code. The alternative is to code two or three times or see viable browsers and other software unable to compete because of patents on the means of compatibility. A standard could increase both productivity and competition.
It's really about time for W3C to step in and standardize APIs for embeddable web content. I know Eolas has the patent, but it's not unusual to see companies licensing at no or reduced cost for patents that are involved in standards on condition that the standard is properly followed. Eolas will get little or nothing if MS circumvents the patent with
I must say I like the quote from Cringely- "Almost the same thing happened during the anti-trust trial when Microsoft offered to create a deliberately retarded version of Windows without Internet Explorer, essentially threatening the court with really bad software if Redmond didn't get its way." You mean Windows hasn't always been "really bad software"?!? Hmm... and "deliberately retarded" too....
Not sure too many people would be interested in this, but the Kerberos authentication clients used by CMU to verify the ID of people also breaks with this update. We were provided with detailed instructions on how to remove the IE 5.5 update until modifications to the plugins (called KClient) were made.
Looking at Eolas, on the one hand, it's kind of funny to see the degree to which Eolas is beating Microsoft in Court, and the ridiculous hoops that Microsoft has jumped though in the process (Microsoft attempt to claim inventorship of Eolas invention-pdf). But on the other hand Eolas patent is sort of the worst kind of patent-squatting - thinking of something, patenting it, and then hoping others will pay you to license it, because you don't plan on developing it.
If you look at Eolas's website you don't get the impression that they're generating too many "algorithms that implement dynamic, bi-directional communications between Web browsers and external applications," to quote Cringely. Granted they developed the first plugin - in 1993! - for Mosaic! but they don't seem to be doing much else these days, in the hey day of the interactive internet. In fact, as near as I can figure they don't generate anything except law suits (right now only against MS, but what's to stop them from going after Netscape, Mozilla, Sun, etc. should they decide to do so.)
You really have to wonder about how far this sort of thing will be taken in the future - that is how many people will patent ideas and not act on them until that fundamental idea has made many companies tremendously successful. After all what if Turing had pattened the idea of "stored information, which can be utilized to control an electronic machine in the preformance of actions determined by the information" - the stored program executable. Morris and Eckert would have had to pay him to write the code for the ENIAC and we'd be paying his heirs everytime we wrote an executable (assuming his heirs renewed the patent).
credo quia absurdum
My take on things:
If Microsoft is "forced" to drop EMBED/APPLET style plug-in support for IE 5.5 SP2, and IE6, it's not "their" fault that Java can't be shipped...
As I stated to cringely in an email... ActiveX is probably untainted by that patent... ActiveX is only a marketing blurb for COM, which was a
re-name from OLE, and we all remember the acronym "object linking & embedding"....
I'm sure Microsoft can prove OLE working in software such as Word, with live Excel document embedding prior to 1993... If the linked sub-components resided on differing network shares...booom, isn't that by definition a
"hypermedia" document? ActiveX support in IE relies on (correct me if I'm wrong), the OBJECT tag, which is Microsoft's own...
By being "forced" to drop Netscape plug-in style support, not only can Microsoft claim "plausible deniability" for java removal, but they can
strike blows against other competing technologies:
- QuickTime, RealAudio/Video (use Windows Media formats instead)
- PDF (use Microsoft Reader w/eBooks instead)
- SVG (Even though it's on it's way to recomended status by the W3C, we have
yet to see any rumblings from Redmond on native support within IE... so...
the Adobe plug-in stops working? use Microsoft's Vector Markup Language
(VML) instead, we support it right in the browser....)
I'm sure there are more than a few "cheshire cat" style grins in Redmond in the last little bit....
Last week I tried to look at the "Microsoft Bra" ad on adcritic. Even though I already have Quicktime installed, it wanted me to install it, again. I figured maybe my Quicktime was downlevel, so I got another.
Restarted Netscape, went back. Wants me to get Quicktime installed.
One of these days I'll look for the ad in mpeg, if I have spare time.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Here's my favorite quote:
But earlier in the article (cnet one)
You mean that MS own's REAL, Adobe and Macromedia? So it disables quicktime, BFD... MS doesn't disable Quicktime on *nix so who cares! (yes I know that there is no IE for linux, but still.. IE for whatever flavor of *nux that it runs on doesn't support quicktime does it?) furthermore:
So before all of you anti-ms fsckers get all up in arms, read the damn story first. Apple is working WITH MS to fix it.
Its like when microsoft is mentioned on slashdot everyone goes nuts saying that MS is anti-(fill in the blank for whatever your supporting this week).
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
You mean I won't be able to watch QuickTime videos with IE on Linux anymore?
Of course I'm kidding: I always immediately leave any site that *requires* a plugin of any kind. If you can't take a picture of it, write some words about it or (in a rare case) make a video of it in a format everybody can read, I'm not interested.
324006
Microsoft leaving Java out of XP doesn't hurt Java.
;)
It hurts Microsoft.
EVERYTHING that is happening in software engineering, everything new and bold and adventurous, is happening in Java. From where I sit here in San Diego, Java is simply taking over. The problem is this: Java isn't just a web page scripting language any more. And because of its structure, it's very easy to write compiler tools for it. As a result, all kinds of nifty new extensions (such as AspectJ) are being applied to it. Even the hardware industry -- including the embedded hardware industry -- is going all over it.
The reason for the above craziness is simple -- Java has features people have been trying to put into languages for years, but unlike those languages, it actually had a marketing push behind it.
Java is no longer Sun's alone. Java is the industry's. And Microsoft's abandoning Java just means that Microsoft has further detached themselves from everything innovative happening in the industry.
Even Apple figured this out. Witness OS X.
By crippling XP so that it can't run Java, they're making the same mistake IBM made when they crippled the PS/2 so that it couldn't use ISA cards, or when GM installed "planned obsolesence" and got waxed by the Japanese in the 80's, or when DEC's president decided he'd rather fly his plane than talk to IBM execs about an OS for their new "PC" dealy-bopper.
DEC is gone. GM is still suffering (although the new attitude at Cadillac shows hope). IBM had to reinvent themselves.
Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot, and in the same way others have done in the past. They've forgotten that they only succeed as long as they serve their customers, and that their customers do not exist to serve them.
It's one of the classic blunders. Like trying to win a land war in Asia.
Of course, there is a huge difference between plug-ins (that need some user interaction for installation) and 'implicitly embedded code' (read activeX) that may not need any interaction, depending on security settings. Also, plugins only need to be installed once, and hopefully from thereon that particular content type can be displayed without further problems (security or otherwise)
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
QT has not even so much as flinched or hiccupped much less crashed my Macs in so damn long I can not recall the last time it caused me any grief... It is as troublefree a piece of software as I can think of... But go ahead, parade your lack of ability to make your OS work with you instead of against you, it's amusing.
But of course they're just INNOVATING.
The plugin developers need only rewrite their API code for XPCOM and (yes, unfortunately) COM. Competent programmers will not find that an unreasonable burden.
I don't think Cringely is aware of this.
Don't get me wrong, I love NS/Mozilla, hate IE.
I had an experience with the "I'll protect you from bad drivers!" syndrome in Windows ME. A dialog box showed up on startup and said something in the line of "This device driver is not certified by Microsoft and will not be installed." There were 2 buttons: "OK" and "Advanced...", clicking Advanced opened a dialog box that had an option of allowing the driver to be installed anyway. And they couldn't put the option in the main dialog box? I was glad I still had that choice, I have a feeling they are going to remove it in Windows XP. I read once that the "official" device drivers for CD-Writers are going to be crippled to prevent "backup copies" of some CDs, and cracked DivX drivers are going to break too.
Great, upgrade to XP and lose some ability to copy CDs and watch (pirated, I admit) movies.
Along with Microsoft's strategy comes this removal of QT support. And I just upgraded to SP2 yesterday, damn I shouldn't have. I haven't upgraded Outlook 2000 with the patch that prevents the opening of executable attachment (no, they don't open itself automatically, you have to double-click it).
I don't see Microsoft software moving anywhere but downhill from here in terms of flexibility. They're making it more idiot friendly and only idiots would want to use it. And yes, I'm a Windows user, but I think I'll stop upgrading to anything "better" from Microsoft now, and slowly move myself to Linux.
I wonder though if Microsoft can get away with this. It maybe walling itself in limited usability, but it seems most users are willing to follow them into that "jail". One can only hope people stop using their products because they got too proprietary, look at Apple dammit. On the browser-side, Mozilla might be able to emerge as the saviour in this problem.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!