Eolas, plug-ins and stupidity

March 30, 2006 by Oliver
Filed under: Technology 

Internet Explorer (and possibly every other browser including Firefox and Opera is about to become a lot more annoying. Apparently a company called Eolas has a patent on browsers with plug-ins. Or to be more precise they have a patent on:

“Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document”

The result is Microsoft having to come up with a way round it to avoid paying licence fees. Any plug-in content on a web page (Flash, Shockwave, the dodgy XForms support or any ActiveX control) will have to be explicitly activated before you can interact with it. In most circumstances this isn’t so bad – except for those annoying floating ads: you’ll have to click them twice to get them to go away.

If you have automatic Windows update, you’ll get it on April 11th as a critical update.

Wikipedia article.
Baekdal article

patents, software patents

Tags:

Comments

2 Comments on Eolas, plug-ins and stupidity

  1. Mike on Wed, 26th Apr 2006 11:11 am

    2. Here is a short Javascript fix + flash/HTML sample that gets around the activation problem without wasting too much time and traffic for downloading a workaround script.

    Doesn’t need any major HTML source code alterations, just a single script include at the end of every page using any flash or applet controls.

    http://www.ediy.co.nz/internet-explorer-flash-applet-activation-fix-xidc19237.html

  2. Oliver on Wed, 26th Apr 2006 12:42 pm

    3. That method for making it work just shows how silly the whole thing is.