xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog

“As some might remember, in 2004 Microsoft lost a lawsuit to Eolas Technologies concerning a patent for ‘Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document’ In short, Eolas holds the patent for how things like flash and quicktime/mediaplayer movies are added to a website — in any browser… Two days ago Microsoft released a preview of the ActiveX update for MSDN subscribers. This update is a workaround — or so Microsoft claim[s] — to the patent, but it also means a very different approach to adding embedded content in Internet Explorer… The ActiveX update makes a very simple change. It prevents you from automatically interacting with an embedded object — like a Flash movie. You have to activate it first.”