Patant Lunacy

6 April 2006

Dear United States of America,
Could you please sort out your patent system, as in this day and age it effects us all as well.

Thanks in advance,

The Rest of the World

Some of you may have read about this already, but it’s an issue I think really isn’t getting enough press:

From April 11th, any ActiveX component in a web page displayed in Internet Explorer – including Flash movies, Quicktime, Real Player etc – will require the user to click first to activate before it’ll run.

The best write up about it, with pictures, can be found here on Robert Nyman’s blog.

It’s all due to silly patent rubbish, but will have an effect on every single web developer out there; any page that embeds an object will require rewriting to use javascript to embed the object instead, which gets round the new patch. If you’ve got javascript turned off, sorry – you probably can’t use flash or quicktime anymore; I imagine almost all Flash etc will be embedded using javascript, and you’ll be lucky if people provide a non javascript fall back.

In many ways I think it’s a slight shame there is a work around – if you did have to click to activate all ActiveX components in IE it would surely both drive people to Firefox and reduce the amount of Flash rubbish we have to put up with.

From: Articles

6 April 2006