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Microsoft Patents Keyboard Browser Navigation
Scooby Snacks writes "It looks like Microsoft and the United States Patent and Trademark Office have done it again. It would appear that Microsoft, in their extensive R&D labs, have developed a way to control a web browser through the use of a keyboard. What's next, a method for displaying a plurality of running programs, each in its own defined rectangular viewing area?"
I am going to be karma flogged for this, but it seems in the last 6 months that the editorial staff of slashdot may have been quietly outsourced. Aren't the number of dupes reaching an unprecidented high in slashdot history?
that this patent will be thrown away as soon as someone challenges it.
If only someone REALLY rich would join our side.
Will a behaviour which has been available in various applications for two decades be exempt from patenting?
The use of keys to control a GUI is far from novel, and just because it's the damned web I fail to see anything new or original about this.
Waay back when Microsoft applications didn't run in windows or anything, and there was no network to connect to, that whole "alt+f" to bring up the file menu was well established in things like DOS' edit program and has been applied to everything since.
Aeons before that, vt100 terminals and the like could use the tab key to move among fields for data input. Hell, the Motif style guidelines would have included stuff which describes how to do keyboard shortcuts, and it predated Microsoft's patent application by a whole lot of years.
I've said this before, but why the hell is a method of interacting with a piece of software via the keyboard a novel or patentable exercise, or does it count as innovation???
If you've had keyboard navigation in applications for over a decade (almost two!), just because you add keyboard navigation to a new application doesn't mean shit.
Meh.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.