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Microsoft Bows to Eolas, Revamps IE
Tenacious Dee writes "The patent quarrel between Microsoft and Eolas takes a strange turn with an announcement from Redmond that the Internet Explorer browser will be modified to change the way ActiveX controls are handled. A Microsoft white paper details the behavior change."
You can see the Patent Here.
Essentially, it's a total bullshit patent attempting to own the concept of having an interactive server/client style application embedded in a webpage.
No, it's not like Flashblock. The article indicates that flash movies will play as they normally do. Only that if you want to click the "Stop" button, you will actually have to click it twice - once to activate the control and a second time to click the button. Dumbdumbdumbdumbdumb.
Furthermore, the webdev can bypass this stupidity using some simple javascript to write out the tags.
Note also that Firefox and other browsers will need to implement a similar change.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I knew someone would turn this into a flamefest about ActiveX.
Allow me to make a technical point on slashdot -- ActiveX is nothing more than an interface standard. It's neither "secure" or "insecure" by itself. As it is used in IE it's no less secure than any other browser plugin mechanism, including those found in Firefox or Safari.
The technology you dislike is not ActiveX -- it's called Internet Component Download. And while it still exists, it's pretty limited in XPSP2, and there's been some rumblings that it will be removed alltogether in Vista.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.