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MS Gives 60-Day Deadline to Web Devs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the annoyances-and-other-wastes-of-time dept.

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."

5 of 375 comments (clear)

  1. Impact on JavaScript by cyngus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Aren't there a good number of JavaScript events that are handled through ActiveX on IE, for example onblur() and onclick()? I hope that I'm wrong or else I've got a lot of JS recoding to do, I hate JS.

  2. Re:Maybe by mingot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Lastly, what I dont understand beyond the above question is... why arent Firefox, Opera, Safari etc... also affected?

    Because the guy who owns the patent has stated that he is only going to sue microsoft.

  3. Ridiculous Solution to Ridiculous Patent by Ruvim · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I wonder who approved this solution in a first case and whether it would be stricken down by another court? Because form the looks of things, we are still having an object in a page, except now it's generated not from the source code, but from Javascript code. I remember in older Netscape browsers text, generated by "document.write" command used to just show up as a straight source code if you do a "View Source".

    If the reasoning was to exclude object creation from the source code, we still have an OBJECT statement, but it's inside of Javascript now. And court said that it makes the difference? WTF?!!

    So, if I write a code that creates JPEG file, but saves it as a text file, with following renaming .TXT to .JPG, have I just avoided JPEG PATENT?

  4. Re:More details? by quantum+bit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How is having javascript that runs clientside to fiddle with the DOM more maintainable than static HTML?

  5. Re:Good Riddance by john82 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Understand that I am not laughing at the position Microsoft has put you in, but I find this incredibly ironic.

    Here Microsoft daily flings FUD at the likes of Linux.
        - "Linux|Open Source. You just don't know where it's been."
        - "Sure, we'll indemnify OUR users."
        - Ballmer: "Linux is stealing our IP. We might sue."

    And yet, when push comes to shove who is getting screwed this time? Developers using MICROSOFT's products.