eolas upside?

By anders pearson 07 Oct 2003

Eolas’ patent lawsuit against microsoft has not made them popular with web developers lately (or those of us who think that software patents are even more evil than microsoft). microsoft recently <a href=”http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/oct03/10-06EOLASPR.asp”>announced</a> that they would be modifying IE’s handling of plugins (such as ActiveX, Flash, Java, Quicktime, etc) to eliminate any infringement.

their update page shows that the change will involve <a href=”http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate/activexchanges.asp#userexperience”>adding a dialog</a> that pops up anytime the user loads a page with a plugin. after the user hits ‘Ok’, it will load as normal.

i read that and was immediately reminded of the <a href=”http://www.texturizer.net/firebird/extensions/#Flash%20Click%20To%20View”>Flash Click to View</a> extension for mozilla, which is incredibly useful for eliminating annoying animated banner adds. the mozilla extension is a little smoother than IE’s dialog boxes because it puts the button right on the page where the plugin would have displayed rather than popping up and getting in the way. but microsoft’s page also says that users will be able to set a preference to have all plugins blocked by default; then, pages with plugins will have a little icon at the bottom that the user can click on to get them to load.

to me it looks like microsoft’s solution to the lawsuit will make IE a better browser. furthermore, not loading ActiveX content by default will be a nice security enhancement (this has been a source of many a hole in the past).

so all it took was a lawsuit to get microsoft to make a usability enhancement to their browser. now, if we can just get a few more companies to sue them, maybe they’ll also add tabbed browsing, popup blocking and better cookie controls.

Tags: usability microsoft eolas software patents plugins lawsuits