For almost two years now, web developers and the general browsing public have felt the pain of the "Click to activate" barrier to multimedia content when using Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. Yesterday, Microsoft announced via the IEBlog that the patent issues have been resolved and a licensing agreement is in place that will allow Microsoft to remove the restriction from the browser.
For those of you who are not familiar with the case, Eolas brought a suit against Microsoft in 1999 claiming the company's web browser violated their patent concerning embedded media in hyperlinked documents. As a result of the judgement against them, Microsoft altered the behavior of the browser to display any Active X media content in web pages as inactive until the user manually "activated" it via the infamous "Click to activate" user interface element. The update was released in early 2006 and affects both Internet Explorer 6 and 7 versions, including the current version in Microsoft's Vista operating system. This new behavior was pushed via the Windows Update system as an automatic update. Many users simply woke up one day to their browser behaving strangely.
From a user experience standpoint this was a nightmare. From the point of view of web developer it became even worse as we spent several months following the update answering client questions and publishing changes to accommodate customers who didn't understand why their beautiful Flash movie suddenly "didn't work." Numerous workarounds were devised and implemented into nearly every developer's workflow worldwide. Despite the perceived shortcomings of the world's most-used web browser, it could not be ignored.
So, you'd think we'd be excited to see this finally resolved and removed from the browsers—and don't get me wrong—we are. But the fix is inexplicably not to be released until April 2008 and the whole issue shows just how big an impact a silly decision like this can make. Microsoft can't make users accept their update no more than they can make them upgrade to IE7, currently about half of the IE browser share. This is desktop software. Microsoft can't take it back. There is no "undo". This is a permanent part of the web now. So Microsoft can release a patch and wipe their hands clean while developers are stuck supporting the effects of this behavior for years to come. It is unfortunate to think that a dispute between two commercial entities can have such a profound impact on the functionality and history of the web over such a petty issue.
Posted on
Fri, November 9, 2007
by Jason Zimdars