MS Gives 60-Day Deadline to Web Devs

capt turnpike writes "Since losing the patent case filed by Eolas, Microsoft has to change radically the way IE works with a lot of content, especially video and other ActiveX controls. eWEEK is reporting that Microsoft has gotten a one-time, 60-day extension in which developers and companies can try to re-engineer their Web pages and ads to work with the new regime. If devs don't make that deadline, users could face pages asking them to activate much of the content, plus ads."

Good Riddance

You mean ActiveX websites will break? . . . And that's a *bad* thing?

Re:Good Riddance

> You mean ActiveX websites will break? . . . And that's a *bad* thing?

They're going to fucking bury that technology. They have done it before, and they will do it again. They're going to fucking kill ActiveX.

Microsoft has gotten a one-time, 60-day extension in which developers and companies can try to re-engineer their Web pages and ads to work with the new regime. If devs don't make that deadline, users could face pages asking them to activate much of the content, plus ads.

And someone, somewhere, will get an ActiveChair flung at them.

Re:Good Riddance

And someone, somewhere, will get an ActiveChair flung at them.

Now that I've stopped laughing at this line, I can reply with who that will be:

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

Re:Good Riddance

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

Mushroom, mushroom!

Re:Good Riddance

Don't get so personal about your work. If the timescales can't be met because of external factors, tell your management. If you need more people on board because of external factors, tell your management. If goalposts need to be moved because of blah blah, blah blah. This is not your problem!

Re:Good Riddance

No it's not like that at all. It's like saying it's not the Network Administrator's responsibility to resource the work required in light of support being dropped for Token Ring. It is his responsibility to provide advice to management and to provide technical resource in any projects which are initiated off the back of the event. It his not his place to protect the business from the effects of an external influence beyond his contractual duties. In IT we are not gods and cannot work magic, only long hours, and if we're not getting paid for them, why should we? And if we are, why are we complaining? And if we feel the balance between work hours and non-work hours is wrong, why did we accept our contract of employment which allows such abuse of employees? And if it isn't in the contract, we don't have to.

At least that is how it works in civilised countries.

Re:Good Riddance

Thanks. Of course young people with a clue but little experience feel they have to work above and beyond the call of duty to make an impression to management and get ahead. But that's the apprenticeship and not the real job. When you're good enough that your skills and knowledge make you competitive in the marketplace, then you're in the position of providing a contractual service. For the first few years in IT the balance is heavily in favour of the employee who gets to learn lots of stuff while being paid. Apprentices (an unofficial title, of course) are in no position to complain about getting opportunities to learn for money. The rewards come later, when you know what you're doing.

Re:Good Riddance

but I have a demo scheduled for April 15th which I can already forsee is going to be a potential disaster.

so you just gave up trying and came to /.? ;-)

It's good and bad

Maybe your senior devs and management might want to take a look at GPL code now. This and many other reasons make it attractive, no vendor lock in (don't you think bill gates and MS are rich enough now?), helps to avoid future patent disputes, etc. It's as good as time as any,and you have 60 days, besides the one demo. Avoid future FUBARs like this, or at least minimise the chances. MS has a clear track record of shady deals and monopolistic abusive tendencies. It is their *business model*. Why be associated with people like that? And something to throw at senior management-where is the fat check from MS to pay for all the stuff you have to change because they were thieves and lost in court and people got sucked into using their stolen code? Aren't they the straight suits dream business? Where's this idemnification action?

The old saying fits, "sleep with the dogs, wake up with fleas"

Re:Good Riddance

Understand that I am not laughing at the position Microsoft has put you in, but I find this incredibly ironic.

Here Microsoft daily flings FUD at the likes of Linux.
    - "Linux|Open Source. You just don't know where it's been."
    - "Sure, we'll indemnify OUR users."
    - Ballmer: "Linux is stealing our IP. We might sue."

And yet, when push comes to shove who is getting screwed this time? Developers using MICROSOFT's products.

Fool me once...

While I sympathize with the parent poster's problem, this situation (and the many others like it) is something to keep in mind the name time you face someone who wants to choose Microsoft because:

• Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft
  
• We need commercial support
  
• We need a company standing behind the product
  

Microsoft routinely and regularly pulls the rug out from under developers and end-users alike. What amazes me is that people continue to choose Microsoft, no matter how many times they get burned.

Say the parent undertakes a massive switch to the .Net version, as he describes. Then, in five years, when Microsoft decides .Net is dead and $the_next_big_thing has to replace it, he or his successor will be faced with the same problem all over again.

A good reason to dump ActiveX

My guess is that Microsoft actually doesn't mind this one bit. ActiveX was a mistake from the get-go, with its permissions-based scheme which is dramatically more hackable than Java's sandbox-based scheme.

There are other technologies that can plug the hole. For some applications, an Ajax page could provide the same level of interactivity as ActiveX. For stuff like Flash, they can have a plugin architecture more line Firefox's.

Bottom line is Microsoft will use this to "encourage" websites to move away from ActiveX and toward their next annoying proprietary technology.

Re:A good reason to dump ActiveX

I highly doubt MS is going to shun their own proprietary technology (especially since they've already said it would be present and "enhanced" in IE7 and Vista.

Wishful thinking; but nothing more I'm afraid.

Re:A good reason to dump ActiveX

Might be time to test those internal apps with the Firefox ActiveX plugin [www.iol.ie], if that's the only thing holding you back...

Re:A good reason to dump ActiveX

this is still an issue until IE7 - in IE 5.5 and 6, XMLHTTPREQUEST is an ActiveX object, not a native JS component.

if my Ajax code is broken, i'm going to be pissed, 'cause I can't just say "use firefox", much as I would love to.

Re:A good reason to dump ActiveX

Bottom line is Microsoft will use this to "encourage" websites to move away from ActiveX and toward their next annoying proprietary technology.

Ignorance, as they say, is bliss.

Nobody here seems to acknowledge the true nature of this problem, because it has nothing to do with ActiveX being thrown away. This is simply a warm welcome to the exciting new world of software patents.

This ActiveX fiasco is a great example. The company holding the patent in dispute, Eolas [eolas.com], is an utter joke. They don't actually make or produce anything except patents. All they do is sit around all day thinking up stuff to patent. That's it. One of these great "products" is a patent dealing with the way embedded interactive multimedia interacts with the user. Part of the patent talks about how the media starts working and interacting. According to the patent, they own the idea behind having it start automatically or in response to page loads.

The truth is that this patent impacts open source software as well, and even though Microsoft presents a much juicier target than the Mozilla Foundation, they have equally "violated" this patent and OSS will feel the impact soon enough.

And THAT is what this is about.

Read this [microsoft.com] and tell me this whole thing doesn't stink like the deepest abyss of Hell. With more and more companies filing patents like nuts, this is the future of software development. Company X is going to spend as much as they did to develop the software just to make sure they don't get sued and have to pull it off the shelves 6 months after shipping. Then there's all the frivolous licensing fees to do stuff like make a Flash animation start when the page loads. How exciting!

There's nothing inherently wrong with ActiveX. It's based on the COM [wikipedia.org] and is actually pretty nice for developing on Windows. ActiveX is just am implementation of an open standard and provides a way to more closely work with the host system. Firefox extensions are really no better, they can completely bork a system just as easily as ActiveX. In the end, when a user clicks "Install" they may have just signed their own death certificate and it doesn't matter what color the pen was.

In any case the whole thing boils down to an example of why software patents, in practice, are a terrible thing.

Re:Tell me about what /really/ matters for me...

If ActiveX is screwed to the point that some heavy engineering is needed to get the websites back into normal operation, some developers might start moving towards open standards that the non-IE browsers support pretty well.

Re:Tell me about what /really/ matters for me...

ah yes, money. there is nothing to be gained from filing suit against mozilla. of course that's why my school district gets sued, but the teachers themselves rarely do.

this highlights a real problem with our IP laws and patents. while patents are good for things, for ideas they are horrible.

Eolas and Mozilla: still open, can still close

As of 2003 (when Eolas won judgement against M$), Mozilla hadn't attempted to reach any agreement. Their post [mozilla.org] on the subject says to simply keep an eye out and be ready to change if we have to change.

Wikipedia currently is still saying "Other browsers such as Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari might have to implement a similar change to avoid infringement, or to license Eolas' patent".

One-Click Activation

From TFA: However, sources tell eWEEK that the situation could be chaotic when the IE patch ships as an automatic update to users of IE 6 on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003.

Each page a user visits will require them to click a button to activate the underlying ActiveX control. Wow. BFD. And that is just for those websites that haven't updated their content by June. Chaotic? Far from it.

Impact on JavaScript

Aren't there a good number of JavaScript events that are handled through ActiveX on IE, for example onblur() and onclick()? I hope that I'm wrong or else I've got a lot of JS recoding to do, I hate JS.

Re:Impact on JavaScript

I think it is fine. My initial concern came from here [microsoft.com], when I saw the list of DTHML events disabled when ActiveX controls are disabled. I think they are referring to the fact that the ActiveX element itself won't generate these events. Not that these events will be unavailable in general. By the way XMLHttpRequest objects won't be affected by this change, as they are not elements that the user interacts with throught he GUI.

Click here to activate Advertising

The sweet irony of it al

This will be a disaster!

Users will be forced to click once before punching the monkey.

Functionality removed as part of security update

They are lucky that there are so many vulnerabilities in IE that they need to release a patch every 1-2 months... without that, users could easily choose not to update.

Even then, they will have to be very careful. With some coverage in the general media, a lot of users could decide that it is better to diable windows update than to find their applications being crippled because of pointless quarrels in court.

Not just ActiveX...

For all those .\ users who say "ActiveX good riddance" - yes, EXCEPT that QuickTime, Flash, and all the other IE plugins are guess way - ActiveX plugins.

So that means every page with any usage of plugins will be broken.

Re:Not just ActiveX...

the "Netscape-style" plug-ins would still be vulnerable; Mozilla is still vulnerable, as is Safari (and its Konquerer codebase).

the patent isn't on the specifics of Active-X, but the absolute general vague as hell concept of the browser plug-in. According to Cringley (years ago), Eolas showed a version in the opensource Mosaic codebase to Sun and Netscape *before* java was included in Netscape 2.0. Java is vulnerable.

Re:Not just ActiveX...

Are you literate? This isn't killing IE, this is a suit based on IP about plugins. Any browser that has plugins would be vulnerable to future suits, including your precious firefox and opera and konqueror and seamonkey or whatever else. It has nothing to do with standards compliance or the quality of that steaming piece of shit browser. And how are their "shady business practices" in any way related? This isn't about monopolies, or media/browser integration, it's a patent case against a specific browser. It's comments like yours that make slashdot so painful to read.

Re:Not just ActiveX...

For all those .\ users who say "ActiveX good riddance" - yes, EXCEPT that QuickTime, Flash, and all the other IE plugins are guess way - ActiveX plugins.

Wait, we can get rid of ActiveX, Flash and quicktime all in one shot?

So, umm, what's the downside again?

The Future of the Internet Experience

"Six months from now, there will be no difference to the Internet experience whatsoever," Wallent said, insisting that customers and developers have been very receptive to making the necessary content modifications.

He's right you know, and it is really too bad...so sad. :(

What if they tried to have a lawsuit...

...and nobody came?

Hey, this isn't a "pro-Microsoft" rant, but wouldn't it be just dandy if the courts declared "Heal yourselves!" to the myriad silly and frivolous lawsuitery that is drowning the domestic business environment?

Of course, you'd have LOTS of poor widdle lawyers out of business.

But hey, is that REALLY such a bad thing?

Microsoft Umbrella?

I thought one of microsoft's main anti-linux FUD points was that if you use M$ technologies that you'll be protected against patent troubles like this...

wtf happened?

Re:Microsoft Umbrella?

Actually I think it is more like : If you use MS technologies you'll be protected against lawsuits by MS.

If Microsoft wanted to do the world a favor..

It would include, as part of this re-engineering effort, a dialog that would appear, explaining to the user, why this is happening- pointing out the destructive nature of software patents. The effect is, that since someone else "owns" the ability to do things a certain way, you are required to do it differently, or fork out some cash. If enough people are made aware of just how sofware patents really do have an effect on what they can and cannot do, perhaps this could be the beginning of some grassroots support for much-needed change.

Missing the point

Where I'm seeing the biggest potential problem is here: Say a company hired somebody a few years ago to make them a brochure style website, and it had a flash intro, banner, etc. The company is used to seeing their website a certain way. When all of the sudden the website starts making them click 'OK' every time they go to their homepage they're going to get pissed off. They also aren't going to know why it's happening, or care, or switch browsers, or bitch about Eolas being a bullshit company, they are just going to call the person who made the site and have them fix it. I think there are going to be a lot of cases like this. Sure big companies are going to see this coming and change their code, and yes nerds will just use FireFox... but many small non-tech-savvy people with websites are going to be hit by this.

How to update your pages

Apple has a helpful page [apple.com] detailing what to do in order to get your pages to continue working as usual with IE.

Patents spur creativity - kind of

Generally, with what I have seen going on I would say they don't in general. On the other hand, patents do encourage people to come up clever alternatives to avoid having to pay money to the patent, that they might have otherwise infinged. Kind of ironic that creativity is not in the patents, but in the avoidence of patents.

More details?

Does anyone have more details on what exactly has to be changed?

Some people are saying it's going to change everything (flash, movies, some JS, etc) while others say that no one will notice the difference.

What's the difference, and what do developers have to do for there to be no difference?

Re:More details?

How is having javascript that runs clientside to fiddle with the DOM more maintainable than static HTML?

The day is April 11th.

Most people will be affected by this starting on the next patch Tuesday from Microsoft (April 11th). TFA states:

"Michael Wallent, general manager of the Microsoft Windows Client Platform, confirmed that the changes will be included in a cumulative IE security update that's on tap to ship on April 11 and said the 60-day extension would apply only to a "small set of customers."

The eWeek article doesn't do a very good job of highlighting that.

Won't disable "non-interactive" ActiveX

Before everybody says "good riddance," note that the upcoming IE update will simply mean you have to click first to enable interaction with the embedded object. This means that things like Flash ads and streaming video will still run automatically -- a user would need to click on them to be able to interact with them, i.e. find the tiny little "mute" or "close" button to make them go away. This page [baekdal.com] previews the update and shows exactly how it will change things.

You can already test this with Windows Update

There is an optional update at Windows Update that says something to the effect of "This update changes the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX ... blah blah blah".

I figure they'll move it from optional to required when the deadline is reached.

I've already installed the update so I can get my sites ready.

ActiveX controls cause a little dialog box to appear that makes you hit either "Ok" or "Yes" in order to use an ActiveX control. Honestly this is fairly rare occurance when browsing most sites.

The big thing that is going to trip people up are flash movies. All flash movies now have a border around them when you mouse over them with a tooltip that says "click to activate and use this control".

The good news is that non-interactive flash movies work regardless of whether or not you activate the controls. Not sure why that is, but that has been my expeience. The bad news is that flash menus (unfortunately some clients want that junk) no longer work until you click on the flash movie to activate the control. This also goes for interactive flash movies that track mouse movement and whatnot.

The workaround is to write the flash movie using javascript.

you can do something simple like document.write() each line of the object tag or use something like UFO (http://osflash.org/ufo [osflash.org]) that is XHTML compliant.

Ridiculous Solution to Ridiculous Patent

I wonder who approved this solution in a first case and whether it would be stricken down by another court? Because form the looks of things, we are still having an object in a page, except now it's generated not from the source code, but from Javascript code. I remember in older Netscape browsers text, generated by "document.write" command used to just show up as a straight source code if you do a "View Source".

If the reasoning was to exclude object creation from the source code, we still have an OBJECT statement, but it's inside of Javascript now. And court said that it makes the difference? WTF?!!

So, if I write a code that creates JPEG file, but saves it as a text file, with following renaming .TXT to .JPG, have I just avoided JPEG PATENT? [google.com]

Web Devs Give 60-Day Deadline to MS

In related news, web developers worldwide have given notice to Microsoft to fix Internet Explorer to actually conform to the standards it purports to support. Any web browser that is not fixed in 60 days will no longer work with many web sites.

In that case...

Enjoy this while you can! [planetdan.net]

Re:Maybe

From the article, it seems that unless the websites are redesigned, users would have to basically click an "OK" button before ActiveX content would load. This includes any ActiveX controls, including ads. Obviously, websites that use ActiveX to display ads would want to remove the need for a user to "authorize" the display of the ad.

Re:Maybe

Maybe I'm just out of it today, but what does this mean?

It means that users should find a better browser to use and developers should use a different technology for their web applications. Of course, the Microsoft solution would be to switch to IE7 and Visual Studio .NET for a hefty upgrade fee.

Re:That doesn't hurt Microsoft!

Just goes to show Microsoft shouldn't copy other people's designs and make their own to prevent this kind of problem.

Tim Berners-Lee wrote the USPTO calling for this patent to be overturned due to prior art. A broad embedded content patent in 1998? Pu-lease. It's as bogus as a $3 bill.

Re:That doesn't hurt Microsoft!

Software patents AT ALL is a problem. I don't care if it was the first person who patented something like this suing, it's just not good for the end user. Suppose MS patented browser extensions, and then sued Firefox or Opera devs... And they probably will start doing stuff like this in light of this decision. I'm no MS fan, but I was on their side for this case. No good can come of this.

Re:Maybe

Frankly after reading the article I havent got a clue where they came up with the ads part.

However, the gist I got from it is any embeded auto playing content ( heres their example list: Adobe's Reader and Flash, Apple's QuickTime Player, Microsoft's Windows Media Player, RealNetworks' RealPlayer and Sun's JVM ) will require activation before playing.
So for example, if you go to a page that has a stock ticker applet in it, instead of it automatically scrolling the current stock market stats, you will have to click it to start. However, if this is true, it would pretty much make Flash useless, as flash based GUIs would become irritating, flash based start pages wouldnt work right, etc...

Lastly, what I dont understand beyond the above question is... why arent Firefox, Opera, Safari etc... also affected?

No matter what you think of Microsoft, in the end, this is bad for the end user and the web in general. Insert misc active X jokes in your replys all you want, you would be suprised how much of the daily web actually depends on this stuff.

Re:Maybe

Lastly, what I dont understand beyond the above question is... why arent Firefox, Opera, Safari etc... also affected?

Because the guy who owns the patent has stated that he is only going to sue microsoft.

Re:Maybe

Here's an eWeek article from January 14, 2004: Eolas Discussing Browser Patent with Linux Community [eweek.com]. In the article, Dr. Michael Doyle, the principal behind Eolas, expresses his support for the "open-source community".

While I'm link-whoring, here's some more stuff if you want insight on the guy: Doyle's homepage [iomas.com], another eWeek interview "Browser Victory Shouldn't Alter HTML" [eweek.com], and an article from I, Cringely [pbs.org] that was one of the first media pieces on the whole issue. More can be found on Google and Wikipedia, of course.

Regardless of Doyle's intentions, I'm against the whole software and business-method patenting regimes. It's been said many times before, but patenting software or business-methods is as ludicrous as patenting story ideas in literature.