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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.
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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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.
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.
--
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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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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".
..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...
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 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.
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