Forum Moderators: open
From SitePoint:
Eolas Technologies Inc. is the company that first invented and now owns the rights to external programs running seamlessly within a Web browser...
As the owners of the technology, they are entitled to require licensing fees of any company that wants to implement their own version of the technology in their products. The recent legal battle was to determine if Microsoft should have paid those fees, or if (as it claims) it developed the plug-in technology on their own before Eolas filed for the patent.
Well, Microsoft lost the case. But rather than pay the licensing fees on the technology, it has decided to modify Internet Explorer so that it no longer infringes on the patent. Unfortunately, these changes mean that every plug-in on a page (i.e. Flash movies, Java applets, PDF documents, etc.) will require the user to click click on a message box like this one as the page is loading.
Many of my site's (through customer request) have some flash elements. This is a nightmare. I've downloaded the developer version. ESPN.com has the error message come up 6 times. About 1/3 of my sites are affected. Anyone with any quick solutions?
Anyone with any quick solutions?
Remove the conflicting elements? ;)
Or:
developer.apple.com/internet/ieembedprep.html
I posted a relatively straightforward workaround in msg#3 of this thead [webmasterworld.com]. Up to you whether that's quick enough... ;)
I hope there is some way for users to turn off that message. If not, Mozilla is looking mighty nice.
http://macromedia.com/devnet/activecontent/articles/devletter.html [macromedia.com]
The one thing I would add to their technique is to place the original embed in a NOSCRIPT tag right after the SCRIPT tag to place the object. Users with javascript enabled will see your page as it is now. Users with javascript disabled will have to deal with the message boxes, but will still end up seeing it, unlike with Macromedia's solution.
Also, it looks like Mozilla and Opera may not have to worry about the patent. It seems Eolas specifically wanted to go after IE. And, unlike trademarks, you don't lose a patent if you don't go after all offenders, you can use it as you see fit.
Microsoft expects that new computers and retail purchases of Microsoft Windows XP will have this behavior sometime early next calendar year. Microsoft also expects that new service packs of Windows XP and Internet Explorer will have this behavior starting sometime after that.
There's going to be another service pack for Explorer? Will it be just security updates or will it include new features, improved CSS?
