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Microsoft Confirms IE Changes in Wake of Lawsuit
theodp writes "On Monday, Microsoft verified that it will be making what it calls "modest" changes to Windows and IE to meet the requirements of the jury verdict against it in the Eolas patent infringement case. Microsoft says it will finish making the changes to IE and Windows by early next year and will provide developers that use IE technology with documentation to help them modify their applications, Web pages, and browser plug-ins to work with the new plug-in scheme, which affects all Web pages that use plug-in technologies such as Adobe Reader, Apple QuickTime, Macromedia Flash, RealNetworks RealOne, all versions of Java, and Windows Media Player. A preview of the new user experience shows the user being prompted to confirm loading of each ActiveX control."
And what about Mozilla? Opera? K-Meleon? Safari?
Is it clear just how much this patent ruling will affect the internet as we know it?
As much as everyone here wants to see microsoft go down, there a thousands of windows applications that rely on these and you can bet that not all of them will be updated anytime soon. Many programs use OLE with WMP and IE to have these features but it sounds like older applications will now be incompatible.
My web browsing experience just got even better!
It guess it just goes to show you that at the end of the day, someone will always find a new way to screw everyone else over for money.
Even though it's just Microsoft, I can't help but think that this is going to end up affecting other stuff too. Once a company like Eolas gets away with this garbage, I doubt they'll quit while they're ahead. I see more lawsuits like this in the future.
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troll::post();
Law of unintended consequences steps up to the plate. This security enhancement took a half billion dollar patent lawsuit to be brought about. What will bring about the next one be and how much will it cost? Maybe, just maybe, they will someday learn that fluid integration of third party code without user approval is a bad idea?
What I see when I look at this new format, is a whole new era of popup ads. With Microsoft now requiring you to click 'Ok' before you can play a flash game, or watch a video, there will no doubt be an entire genre of popup ads designed to look just like these windows.
Ad ware will run rampant, as users are clicking OK left, right and center.
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Why can't Microsoft just licence the patent? Its interesting to see to matter what happens and what it costs microsoft will aways prefer to get round something that pay for it, even if it would be cheaper to pay for it.
James
Fantastic. More browser sniffing, more money spent on more developer time to code workarounds for the new behavior, and more dialogs to arbitrarily disrupt user experience.
You're ignoring (probably intentionally) the awful precident this sets in regards to the enforcement of (ridiculous) software patents. Let's recognize what is truly the greater evil here.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
To be really careful about security, I turn Active X off on all sites except a few. I get that annoying "This site may not display properly ...." message and cant get rid of it (Microsoft dosent want me to not use Active X remember) Now -users- of Active X will have it just as bad or worse it appears.
And I just finished training all my users to NOT click OK on boxes that pop-up when using the web. Now you're saying I have to train them to make educated decisions to accept or decline boxes?
The monkey trainers at the circus will have an easier time...
Sigh.
IMHO the Eolas vs M$ case proves once and for all that (software) patents -- used with good or bad intentions -- frustrate rather than further innovation.
--
Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it -- Andrew Young
Yeah, but the warning dialog is conspicuously missing a "Cancel" button.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
If anyone has read Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface" they know that a dialog box that allows only one action has a information theoretic efficiency of 0 (E=0). He was referring to dialog boxes with that at least told the user something important or useful, "Finished searching document" for example. But this takes the cake. E must equal -1 (E=-1) they might as well just have a dialog box with a button and no message at all.
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Is it just me or is an alert box with just an OK button completely worthless in this case? All it does is delay loading the control without giving the user the ability to not have it load. The user only has two choices: load the potentially dangerous control, or leave the dialog box on screen. This doesn't solve any of the problems and just adds more headaches to the browsing experience.
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Looking at the changes to the user experience document from MS, it seems to me that this may be trivial in the long run.
... and it may not, depending on the way it was written (anyone have a link to the patent itself?) If not, then all we need are some good mime-encoders. The main bad part, I guess, is getting away from standard HTML, but then you were doing that anyway when you embedded a plugin...
You can't pass "PARAM" lines with clear text data, but you *can* pass DATA lines with base64 encoded data. So what do we need to do? Encode our PARAM data lines, of course.
This may break the patent
You bring up what could be an unintended benefit to this ruling. Perhaps developers will now stick to more friendly interfaces. I rarely stay long at a company's page that utilizes flash extensively (and almost entirely avoid pages that only use flash (for interface, content, etc.)).
If a visitor goes to the page and nothing comes up but a little notice that says, "Stuff didn't load", they will leave without the company getting its message across. That will encourage the company to have a web page that uses html and jscript and php and whatnot to get there message across and will limit plug-ins to only the content that really needs it.
Additionally, While I use Windows, IIS, etc. I don't use things like ActiveX Controls on web pages. I think there are better ways to go about it. Now, when a company is developing it's great new intranet app, will they use ActiveX Controls and force the employee to load each page twice (and waste MONEY), or will they come up with a newer and/or better way to do the same stuff?
Don't get me wrong, I don't agree w/ this decision, but maybe it will have some unintended benefits.
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor - Albert Einstein
While I can understand his motive, I'm not fond of it at all. Abusing an over-abused process to get your way is going to encourage other people to do it if you win. Besides, it gives the IE advocates ammo along the lines of "Mozilla only survived because MS was forced to cripple IE".
Shouldn't be too hard to write a program that watches for that dialog box and hits OK for you. Security be damned. Its a windows box. As for open source browsers, if they are required to do something like this they should be sure there is an easy source code work around. Maybe they can't distribute their software with the work around in place, but just download the source, muck with a few lines of code, and re-compile. At least power-users won't have to deal with it. There's no law against modifying the source on your system. Yet.
I wonder why that is not against the patent. No matter how you insert your flash media - the plugin will get loaded seemlessly, which is what the patent is all about afaik. I see no difference in having static html code or dynamic JS code that links to media, in the end it will load the plugin without user interaction (unless the user has disabled JS).
I know that this workaround is from microsoft, but i don't see the real difference. Anyway i don't think this change will affect end-users, because web-professionals will update their pages to avoid the messagebox and lame users wont update their browsers (and therefore avoid the messagebox w/o knowing it..or useful or good in any real way - but I suppose you already knew that.
I think we'll be seeing more and more of this garbage in the years to come - software coded awkwardly to get around useless patents.
My solution? Cut the time on software/business patents to 3 years. Plenty of time to build a lead based on a valid new idea - very little opportunity to "pre-patent" an obvious idea to extort with later.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Gee, thanks, 95% of my users are pissed off. But he wanted to make a statement.
What did he think was going to happen, suddenly everyone is going to switch from IE? Bzzz, wrong answer. It's nearly impossible to get people to upgrade from Netscape 4, switching browsers would be like pulling teeth.
Mozilla and company better hope that the fix still lets plugins work with their browsers, because that's going to be how it's fixed. It's going to make the web more IE centric and the sites will be fixed to work with IE first.
I am very concerned about the real out come from this. Since my crystal ball runs Windowz it is not working. Micro$oft settled with these "People" and gave them enough cash to pay lawyers for quite a long time. Who/what else is going to wind up "infringing" ?
Now Micro$oft is going to make "changes" to IE, just what is no longer compatible? Let me guess, all older versions of IE. Are all web pages no longer going to be able to support older versions of IE with out "infringing"? Now which versions of the Microsoft OS are going to get new versions of IE? Win XP for sure, Win2K? Win9x will probably not get a new version. Now it will become unusable.
Now it's easy to start a rallying cry about getting new users on the LINUX platform, by suggesting that disgruntled users will switch. However most of them are probably not really tech savvy and were really stressed to get their AOL CD into the computer in the first place.
I guess more obsolete computers on the used/surplus/junk market is a good thing? The users left in the lurch will most likely buy new computers with some Micro$oft OS, on them.
Now worst cast paranoid thought. Micro$oft wanted this to happen.
All this Eolas guy did was clamp down on the independent browser makers -more-.
so MS figures out a workaround... due to the fact that IE holds 95% of the market, all the big plugin vendors will change their access methods to support the new workaround.
So web developers who wish maximum coverage (nearly all) will change their html code to support the new access method.
Then, either other browser vendors have to spend just as much money to maintain compatibility, or they lose the features on any site that has switched to support 95% of the internet.
And a small browser company's turnover time for making the change is going to be longer than MS, as they don't have the swarms of programmers. So it costs the independent software developers at least the same in programmer wages (excepting -purely- OSS browsers) to do the change, but costs them more in user-satisfaction and market-share as they have a longer time without the features, and they've lost programming time they could have been using to -improve- their own browser.
How much time has the Opera or Safari team already lost just doing CYA code reviews to ensure they're not in an exposed legal position?
And as for this altruistic notion that Eolas is only out to stop the Big Bad Guy... what happens if IE does lose market share to something like Opera? What happens when Eolas would suddenly decide that that Opera's business tactics weren't fair either?
There's too much legal risk for a browser developer to -not- migrate to supporting the new method right away. Sure, they'll probably be backwards compatible to the old way - but what web developer wants to embed an activex plugin in their web content that is unusable to 95% of their potential market?
Keep in mind that this new plugin requirement only needs to displays an 'Ok' box in the event that the plugin data is remote. Meaning if you go to homestarrunner.com and watch an sbemail flash movie hosted from homestarrunner.com - there's no messagebox; it's still a seamless experience.
So what does this mean? Well... it does mean that you'll have to click Ok once for every remotely hosted activex ad (nightmare).
I myself tend to think that web hosts would sooner drop plugin ads, or start hosting locally long before they'd suffer through potentially losing 95% of their viewers.
(I certainly hope that IE ads a config option so I can disable remote activex data streams altogether. That'd be a pretty good adblocker. I guess there may be a silver lining.)
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
but the Eolas guy specifically says that he wanted to use his patent to change the landscape of the broswer industry; he talks about allowing other browsers back into the market by only enforcing his patent against Microsoft
I fail to see how this will "change the landscape of the broswer industry". Microsoft published instructions on how to create web pages that do not prompt the user. Greater than 90% of web browsers are IE. So every web developement firm (or company that puts up it's own public website) will have to do extra work to fix old sites and write new ones (or else their customers, the people whose content on the sites will complain).
Nothing will change, except for wasted work hours. IE will still be the dominant web browser (which may change in the future, but not because of Eolas).
The point of this dialog is NOT to enhance security, or give the user a choice, it's to get around the patent. That's it's only purpose.
<i>Actually, the dialog shown only allows you to click "OK". Who needs options when you've got Windows :-)</i>
What about
| This dialog was brought by you by the |
| friendly folks from Eolas, your favorite |
| extortion company. Press OK to continue. |
| |
| [ OK ] |
I don't think software patents are inherently bad.
I disagree. And I'll go further. I think all patents are inherently bad.
Patents are to promote progress. That is what the constitution says. They did do that before huge corporations collected and traded patent portfolios with their friends. Nobody could have imagined global multi-national corporations with gross revenues that are larger than many actual countries.
Patents no longer promote progress. They are something bought and sold to use as a nuclear weapon. I don't believe any reform of the patent system will fix this aspect of it. Shorten patent lifetimes. Fix the examination process. Still, you have patents, which are exclusive monopoloies, being bought and sold in order to restrict who can do what, rather than promote progress.
Companies will still amass huge patent portfolios so that if they get sued, they can always counter sue. If you sue IBM for anything, you can expect an expensive patent countersuit. Standard procedure. All of SCO's products infringe those four patents IBM claims. Why did IBM respond with only four patents instead of 2000 patents? So that they don't look to the judge like they are gaming the system. Nonetheless, they will stop all of SCO's products. Even if SCO could show one patent to be invalid, thus freeing some of their products from infringement, IBM can just file another patent suit after that. Patent litigation is very expensive. You must prove that the patent is invalid (expensive) or prove that you don't infringe (also expensive).
It is simply not possible for anyone to write a program that does not infringe a dozen patents held by Lucent, IBM, Microsoft, etc.
Do you really think reforming the patent system is going to fix these problems and start promoting progress? Patents no longer serve the public good.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Fully agree, all patents must be abolished.
The few things that might not be developed without and that are really necessary and useful (medicine comes to mind) is always mentioned by proponents to explain why we "must have" patents.
As if no progress was made until the 19th century (before which patents did not exist). This view is a scandalous ignorance of the history of our culture and science.
Should commerce on its own no longer develop new medicines: 90% of new medicines we can do without (they only make the healthcare system unsustainable, i.e. too expensive). The remaining 10% must be state funded: all that is really indispensible must not be left to commerce, since that is truely dangerous.
At the moment many states spend more and more on subsidies for healthcare (direct or indirect), much of which flows in the pockets of farma industry. It would be better to spend that public money on directly funding universities and researchers to develop those products that are truely needed.