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MS Gives 60-Day Deadline to Web Devs
capt turnpike writes "Since losing the patent case filed by Eolas, Microsoft has to change radically the way IE works with a lot of content, especially video and other ActiveX controls. eWEEK is reporting that Microsoft has gotten a one-time, 60-day extension in which developers and companies can try to re-engineer their Web pages and ads to work with the new regime. If devs don't make that deadline, users could face pages asking them to activate much of the content, plus ads."
For all those .\ users who say "ActiveX good riddance" - yes, EXCEPT that QuickTime, Flash, and all the other IE plugins are guess way - ActiveX plugins.
So that means every page with any usage of plugins will be broken.
As of 2003 (when Eolas won judgement against M$), Mozilla hadn't attempted to reach any agreement. Their post on the subject says to simply keep an eye out and be ready to change if we have to change.
Wikipedia currently is still saying "Other browsers such as Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari might have to implement a similar change to avoid infringement, or to license Eolas' patent".
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Apple has a helpful page detailing what to do in order to get your pages to continue working as usual with IE.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
The eWeek article doesn't do a very good job of highlighting that.
Before everybody says "good riddance," note that the upcoming IE update will simply mean you have to click first to enable interaction with the embedded object. This means that things like Flash ads and streaming video will still run automatically -- a user would need to click on them to be able to interact with them, i.e. find the tiny little "mute" or "close" button to make them go away. This page previews the update and shows exactly how it will change things.
There is an optional update at Windows Update that says something to the effect of "This update changes the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX ... blah blah blah".
I figure they'll move it from optional to required when the deadline is reached.
I've already installed the update so I can get my sites ready.
ActiveX controls cause a little dialog box to appear that makes you hit either "Ok" or "Yes" in order to use an ActiveX control. Honestly this is fairly rare occurance when browsing most sites.
The big thing that is going to trip people up are flash movies. All flash movies now have a border around them when you mouse over them with a tooltip that says "click to activate and use this control".
The good news is that non-interactive flash movies work regardless of whether or not you activate the controls. Not sure why that is, but that has been my expeience. The bad news is that flash menus (unfortunately some clients want that junk) no longer work until you click on the flash movie to activate the control. This also goes for interactive flash movies that track mouse movement and whatnot.
The workaround is to write the flash movie using javascript.
you can do something simple like document.write() each line of the object tag or use something like UFO (http://osflash.org/ufo) that is XHTML compliant.
While I'm link-whoring, here's some more stuff if you want insight on the guy: Doyle's homepage, another eWeek interview "Browser Victory Shouldn't Alter HTML", and an article from I, Cringely that was one of the first media pieces on the whole issue. More can be found on Google and Wikipedia, of course.
Regardless of Doyle's intentions, I'm against the whole software and business-method patenting regimes. It's been said many times before, but patenting software or business-methods is as ludicrous as patenting story ideas in literature.
Might be time to test those internal apps with the Firefox ActiveX plugin, if that's the only thing holding you back...
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