Plug-ins Getting Unplugged from IE

And now for the real questions

Submitted by ppk on October 15, 2003 - 07:44.

Clear overview, thanks. But now for the real questions:

First and foremost: how is Microsoft going to explain this to Explorer users? The average user will, sooner or later, 'suddenly' see all kinds of strange alerts that he doesn't understand. His reaction will probably be 'that the browser is broken' and he'll be annoyed. How will Microsoft prevent this annoyance from becoming so severe and widespread that users may become interested in other browsers?

Microsoft, Apple, Macromedia, and Real Networks have all provided information to developers to allow them to avoid infringing on the Eolas patent.

True. But it won't be enough. Most site owners will not read these press releases and will do nothing. That's not Apple's, Real's or Macromedia's problem, though.

Far more interesting is that Apple hasn't done anything about Safari yet, while I'd say it breaks the patent, too. Why not?

This whole chain of events is weird. Frankly, I still don't believe that Microsoft will voluntarily annoy its users to the point where 'other browsers' may become a real alternative. Therefore I still don't believe the updated IE Windows will really be released.

It just doesn't make sense.

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It's not about a <plugin> tag!?

Submitted by milky on October 18, 2003 - 12:04.

English not being my mother tongue often keeps me thinking that I've gotsomething wrong, but this time I'd say this article is just plainlywrong in its wording choose.

[...] running Flash-movies, or other plug-ins, [...]

The so called plug-ins are software programs and libraries that hook intobrowsers to display multimedia files inlined into html documents. Thoseembedded multimedia objects aren't called "plug-ins", if so there was a htmltag like <plugin> instead of <embed> and <object> - wouldn't it?

On my computer the plug-ins are called "libflashplayer.so","libjavaplugin_oji.so" or "mplayerplug-in.so" and reside in/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ (I think despite the path and a .dll extensionit's almost the same for Windoze systems).

And now things like Flash-movies or Java-applets have extensions like .swfor .class/.jar and should really be seen as the data object files theyactually are in this case (even if at least applets can in fact be viewedas programs). You should really NOT call these files "plug-ins".

May be that's just a terminology issue here and I now complained a bit toloadly about that; but for cases like this (the article was about a highlytrivial patent) also such small things can make a difference. For providingan objective view on the issue it would really help to not intermix themeaning of "plug-in" and "embedded multimedia" stuff.

If Eolas had a patent on "plug-ins" this would have a much larger impact onthe whole IT industry, and not only for one browser vender. But I'm stillnot sure if their patent now is about the <embed> and <object>tag, every new (and that imprecisely written) article makes it more unclear.

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Image rendering in browser is also a 'plugin'

Submitted by dusoft on October 20, 2003 - 00:12.

E.g. Netscape used to have Plugins option in menu somewhere and on choosing it, plugins were listed - also image plugins were among (JPEG plugin to display jpeg images embedded in text etc.)

I guess even Word DOCument opened in browser could be considered plugin - because it calls word software internally - but this has been always treated as linking to software libraries as have milky mentioned

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JavaScript solution can work around this

Submitted by RonNorthrip on October 23, 2003 - 04:56.

MS has posted a solution for this problem on the developer network. The key thing is that the object, embed, and applet tags have to be extracted to an external javascript file, linked and called as a function. If you don't follow all of these steps then it doesn't work.

I've written a piece of software that automates this fix for any website. IEWebFix v 1.0 is available for immediate download from http://www.rnsoft.com/products/iewebfix/

More information about this problem is available at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate/
http://developer.apple.com/internet/ieembedprep.html

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Free Macromedia "Fix"

Submitted by libcrypt on October 26, 2003 - 16:07.

Macromedia has a beta of their own in-house free automated fix-tool, which they claim they will "support", presumably for some time.

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W3C finds prior art

Submitted by aardvark on October 30, 2003 - 11:03.

The W3C put out a press release yesterday titled World Wide Web Consortium Presents US Patent Office with Evidence Invalidating Eolas Patent. Really, what else do I need to say? Oh, yes, the citation of prior art is an interesting read, if you're into that sort of thing.

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U.S. Patent Office Steps In...

Submitted by aardvark on November 12, 2003 - 06:54.

From an article at news.com:

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has stepped squarely into a fight roiling the Web by agreeing to re-examine the Eolas patent for a browser plug-in [...].

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Re: U.S. Patent Office Steps In...

Submitted by ppk on November 12, 2003 - 07:17.

...and Microsoft has gotten exactly what it wanted.

The 'revised release' of Explorer made everyone go wobbly in the knees. "Gee, is this really how we'll see Flash movies from now on?" Therefore others took the burden of defeating the patent upon themselves, and Microsoft could sit back and take it easy.

I read a remark by Tim O'Reilly somewhere, that he thought the jury would have refused the patent if anyone but Microsoft had been the accused party. The jury effectively voted against Microsoft, not in favour of Eolas.

I believe this, and it means that Microsoft could not take action itself, since it would once again be defeated because it was Microsoft. Instead, they made themselves look poor and set-upon: "Oh my, we really don't want to do this, but that naughty patent forces us to show alerts all over the place!" And everybody reacted as expected and took Microsoft's side for once, and started looking for ways to defeat the patent in their own name instead of Microsoft's.

Nicely played, very nicely played. And Microsoft's strategy netted us web developers the knowledge necessary for running several Explorers next to each other. It would never have been possible if we hadn't had the IE6/Eolas special edition to study.

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several explorer's next to each other?

Submitted by aardvark on November 12, 2003 - 15:34.

And Microsoft's strategy netted us web developers the knowledge necessary for running several Explorers next to each other.

Whoah, there, tiger. Don't just throw that little tidbit onto the table and yank it away like that. There are some readers who don't know that such information was exposed, so helping out with a little URL to the booty would be nice.

And yes, I agree with you that MS got just what it wanted — a lot of non-MS people to raise a stink and get some other teams involved. Frankly, that's why a lot of us didn't start recoding anything, we suspected it would change anyway.

Hey, a leftover burger!

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