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Changes to IE

7 October 2003

Microsoft has published details of how Internet Explorer has changed in response to the Eolas plugins court case it lost last month. Wow. The appeal hasn’t even gone through yet, and I thought there was also talk of the whole thing being dropped. Rather uncharacteristically, Microsoft seems very keen – too keen? – to comply.

Anyway, there you have it. Macromedia also has this Active Content FAQ, which states

In this future version of Internet Explorer, active content that is embedded in HTML pages in certain ways will cause the browser to prompt the user to confirm the loading of each instance of active content on that page. This interrupted page loading experience can be remedied well in advance of the browser’s release by making straightforward modifications to the way active content is coded in HTML pages.

So it looks like there’s a need for some end-user education pretty sharpish. I don’t think that this is enough. [hat tip: JD]

- Drew McLellan

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Comments

  1. § Jesse: I still wonder, how will this help or hurt Mozilla?

    A part of me is happy Microsoft is not entertaining this patent.
  2. § Nathan Pitman: Have u downloaded the patched version of IE6 yet... mmm...
  3. § Drew: Yes, it’s funny how when they choose to it’s perfectly easy to run two different versions of IE side-by-side. Hmmm.
  4. § Bryce: I read the Macromedia solution, and all it does is abstract the embedded flash, shockwave (or whatever) content into an external javascript file. So instead of putting an object tag in the html page, you put a call to a javascript page, which uses javascript to write the exact same object tag.

    While I am happy to see that the solution is that easy... I find it ridiculous that Eolas profitted half a billion dollars from this whole ordeal.

    Am I missing something here?

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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