Plug-ins Getting Unplugged from IE
Many of you may already be aware of the Eolas Technologies lawsuit against Microsoft for patent infringement as reported on News.com. It is perhaps the only time the general web community hasn't been rooting for the little guy to win out over Microsoft. For those who don't know, the short short on it is that Eolas has claimed that the concept of plug-ins, a patent owned by the University of California, and licensed exclusively to Eolas, has been infringed by the very ability of Internet Explorer to play plug-ins inline with browser content.
Ultimately, this means that running Flash movies, or other plug-ins, alongside web page content (Flash art on HTML pages, for example) is a violation and that developers need to find another way to do it — whether by invoking dialogs when a plug-in is about to launch or by opening alternative content in new application windows. The implications of this are big. So much so, that the W3C has weighed in and formed an advisory panel (the HTML Patent Advisory Group) and released a FAQ on how the patent may impact the web.
On Tuesday, Microsoft said that it will make adjustments to Internet Explorer by early 2004 to prevent it from infringing on the patent. For now, the changes will consist of the browser firing a dialog box before allowing the embedded plug-in to run. Microsoft, Apple, Macromedia, and Real Networks have all provided information to developers to allow them to avoid infringing on the Eolas patent. Sadly, most of these fixes require extensive use of client-side script and invalid HTML tags in order to work. Zeldman goes into detail on the validation and accessibility issues on his site, and has a number of links to examples and some thoughts on how this will pan out over the next few months.
Some links to the software makers on the hook:
- The Microsoft Developer Network site provides instructions for developers, as well as follow-up information on the changes to the handling of ActiveX controls by IE.
- Apple's Developer Connection offers suggestions and sample pages with QuickTime movies.
- Macromedia's Developer Center offers a number of FAQs and suggestions for developers. As Macromedia may stand the most to lose, they offer a number of pages devoted to the potential impact.
- RealNetworks also offers sample code and suggestions to work around the changes to Internet Explorer and the patent.
Comments
And now for the real questions
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.
It's not about a <plugin> tag!?
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.
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.
Image rendering in browser is also a 'plugin'
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
JavaScript solution can work around this
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
Free Macromedia "Fix"
Macromedia has a beta of their own in-house free automated fix-tool, which they claim they will "support", presumably for some time.
W3C finds prior art
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.
U.S. Patent Office Steps In...
From an article at news.com:
Re: U.S. Patent Office Steps In...
...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.
several explorer's 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!