IE Patent endgame detailed

Hello, it’s 1993 calling. Hope everyone enjoyed static websites without rich media.

A software developer named Eolas claims that it owns the patent to embedded technologies, and has filed a $521 million lawsuit against Microsoft and has demanded that Microsoft remove the “embedded Active X” properties from I.E.

This would effectively cripple the way that Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime, and other media formats, and would likely spell certain doom for Opera, Netscape, and Mozilla all of which also use various embedding properties to display rich media.

Great. Images and text only. It’s 1997 all over again. Thank god I’m re-designing HeadsDown and TSN already, I’ll just keep these points in mind.

Microsoft is suggesting that while they think they will be ultimately successful, we should use techniques such as scripting, and DHTML to launch external applications…of course this will eventually open up a whole new can of security worms, and we’re screwed again.

Damn.