Eolas COO Says IE Changes A Shame

capt turnpike writes "Hot on the heels of Microsoft's announcement of a 60-day period in which Web developers will have to change their pages' architecture, the COO of Eolas, the company whose suit forced these changes, gives an interview to eWEEK.com in which he says these changes are a disappointment. Confused? From the article: 'There is no court order forcing Microsoft to do anything. Anything that is being done is of Microsoft's own choosing,' His position is that publicizing these forced changes strengthens MS's case."

Re:Very disappointing

[amliebsch]

Exactly. The summary doesn't make it clear that he is saying that the changes are not required because Microsoft could simply pay them for the privilege of not changing it. I say, you sue somebody for doing something, you forfeit your right to complain when they stop doing it!

Re:Not forced...

[whitehatlurker]

That should be: "Eolas is probably sad that MicroSoft hasn't bought them outright"

Re:Confused? Yes, I am.

[hal9000(jr)]

You can find the changes Activating ActiveX Controls [microsoft.com].

Seems like some simple work arounds for newly developed applications. Hate to retrofit all the existing stuff out there.

PR Stunt

[moochfish]

Sounds like a PR stunt trying to make MS look bad for going around their patent instead of paying royalties. He already got 500 million; he's upset he's not getting even more.

At least this will keep the other browsers safer from further litigation down the road. If MS had bent over backwards and paid, every other browser that ever gained any market share would have been next in line to pay retroactive royalties. Now that MS just changed the rules of the HTML world (as usual), it's not crazy to think other browser vendors won't be ready to follow just to avoid having to pay the costly lesson that MS had to pay.

Re:No, What's A Shame Is

[NialScorva]

The fact that this company basically patented a software design pattern isn't evidence? Modular achitectures are one of the most basic ideas of software, and this company claims that it owns that idea in the area of web browsing.

Not Such a Big Deal

[MightyMait]

Well, having had a quick look at the MSDN article [microsoft.com] linked to from the eWeek article, it doesn't look like such a big deal.

If the object is instantiated by in-line code, it will still respond to scripting commands but will not respond to user commands until they click somewhere in particular. If an external "JScript" file (does it hurt that much to say "Java", M$?!?!), is used to instantiate the object, there is no change in the way the page will behave.

So, we can make minor changes to all our ActiveX control-embedding pages to keep them behaving the way they do now, or not. The world will not end.

Re:Patent scum

[I'm Don Giovanni]

You realize you can recode your sites to use JavaScript load the Flash objects from an external file, right, and thus avoid the "having to click a button" issue?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/workshop/a uthor/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp [microsoft.com]

So this is a payday for you. Your clients will pay you to recode the sites; and the recoding is pretty trivial, so it's almost like getting money for free. :-)

Re:Not only Microsoft

[Bill Dog]

The only problem with this is that Eolas has freely admitted that they are not going to go after any other browser, only IE.

Unless they've delivered to all other browser makers legal documents forfeiting the right to sue them for infringing this patent, that promise means nothing. IANAL but I doubt this could even be done in a legally valid way unless some consideration was involved.

Re:Not Such a Big Deal

[AeroIllini]

does it hurt that much to say "Java", M$?!?!

Someone needs a history lesson.

JavaScript, originally named Mocha and then LiveScript, was developed in 1995 by Netscape, and debuted in version 2.0. It was named JavaScript to coincide with Netscape's added Java support, even though the languages are not that similar.

JScript was added by Microsoft to Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996, in response to Netscape's JavaScript. JScript originally used the Active Scripting engine, also known as ActiveX.

ECMAScript is the current, formal standardization (ECMA-262) of both JavaScript and JScript into a single unified language. Currently, both JavaScript and JScript are considered extensions of ECMAScript, since they are fully compliant with extra functionality. It is possible (and recommended) that all client-side J(ava)Scripting be written as fully compliant ECMAScript, as it will then be compatible with all browsers.

To this day, all Gecko-based browsers support JavaScript, and IE supports JScript (it is also available as part of .NET). Both are ECMAScript compatible, as are all the various versions used by other browsers.

Re:the end of activex?

[I'm Don Giovanni]

Even if IE still used netscape's plugin architecture, it wouldn't matter. Any plug-in architecture that handles EMBED, OBJECT, or APPLET tags by loading the appropriate plugin when necessary is subject to the patent.

Re:Not Such a Big Deal

[mermonkey]

Exactly...
This is really less of an interuption to the user-experience than people are thinking. I too panicked when i started reading this stuff yesterday. I have a widely deployed intranet web app with multiple supported versions and streams out there and was afraid i'd be shipping tons of emergency patches. I installed the "upgrade" and the change to the experience is subtle and intuitive enough not to be disruptive in most cases. Basically just a little tooltip shows up when you hover over embedded content (no alert, no popup, no ok button...). One click enables it. This means that for certain controls, an extra click is required... As it turned out in my case, all of my embedded stuff is already scripted so there is actually no behavior change triggered.

Tip: if you enable script debugging in IE, you'll see the new behavior regardles of whether or not the embedding is scripted... go figure.

Can anyone be bothered to explain to me why eola's patent is infringed if a browser enables an embedded in html, but not if i embed using js onLoad?? what da!
s.

Re:Is this a bad thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't have to click OK to load the ActiveX control. The control loads per normal. The difference is that now in order to interact with the control you have to select the control first. So the media player will load and the video will start to buffer and play, but if you want to pause the video or adjust the volume in the embedded player you have to click on the player as a whole (which displays a focus rectangle around the entire control) and then you can click on the constituent buttons.

It's not a big deal. Minor nuisance at best. Pretty much everything continues to work, however.