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."

Comments

..And the others?

[Locky]

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?

Re:..And the others?

[the_mad_poster]

This is a very good point.

This is probably one of the very few times we'd want to see Microsoft win a case like this. Eolas claims that they're just going after Microsoft, but who's next? They can clobber the living daylights out of all sorts of other people now in a misguided bid to make money on litigation (the New Gold Rush, anyone?).

The door swings both ways: if Microsoft is abusing companies (ok, bad choice - IBM or Amazon might be better) with a ridiculous set of patents, we should be yelling. However, if Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, etc. is being abused by a ridiculous set of patents, we need to yell just as loud.

How does that go... oh yes:

"And when they came for me, there was noone left to speak out for me."

Re:..And the others?

[pirhana]

>This is probably one of the very few times we'd want to see Microsoft win a case like this
Not me ! I want Microsoft to loose this case. If microsoft loose this case, more and more people will become aware of the danger of software patents. Nobody is going to realise the danger of software patents when a handful of Free software projects are affected. This specific case has drawn a lot of attention to the issue of software patents because its microsoft at one end. I wish more and more software lawsuits come up and more and more people become aware of this. There is nothing to be complacent when microsoft or somebody like them win a couple of lawsuits and software patents largly remain.

Law of unintended consequences

[onyxruby]

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?

Oppertunity Knocks

[Malicious]

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.

This wasn't really a Good Thing (tm)

[goldspider]

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.

Re:IE changes

[Asprin]

Yeah, but the warning dialog is conspicuously missing a "Cancel" button.

...of course, you **could** go into the IE security config and set it to prompt you when loading signed and unsigned controls -- THAT one has a cancel button...

E=0

[edalytical]

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.

Is it just me..

[webrunner]

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.

Re:uhg

[lordvdr]

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.

Re:Unexpected.

[Darren Winsper]

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".

The button wasn't meant to be informative...

[JMZero]

..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.