With final judgment looming, Microsoft is preparing to roll out a new version of IE that strips the automated plugin-launching features Eolas's patents were found to cover (IE patent endgame detailed). It's not going to be pretty.
It's not like there's any major functionality that'll just go away completely. IE's notorious feature bloat provides dozens of ways to skin any particular cat; the crazed security model that produces a new critial alert every few months means has always made it easy for web pages to get access to non-IE programs at the browser end.
But the rewriting of web pages involved is going to be quite substantial. Consider some of the awful hacks listed in the article:
- Pop up a dialog box before launching a plugin. (The patent only covers "automated" plugins, so, allegedly, a system requiring user input is okay.) Imagine getting an dialog box every time you view a web page with Flash or Java. Imagine dropping IE like a hot potato.
- Put the actual data for the plugin inline, instead of linking to it (Microsoft thinks the patent doesn't cover inline data, although Microsoft's ability to predict accurately what the patent covers has been proven to be somewhat sketchy.) It sounds attractive, but making the entire page wait while the applet loads is going to be brutal. It would make pages with applets basically unreadable on dialup connections . . . .
- . . . so Microsoft is suggesting the use of separate frames. Oh, boy oh boy. Because if there's one thing that users and web designers love, it's extra framesets.
The article quotes an unnamed source talking about the dangers of the patent system: "The W3C has worked very hard to make the Web remain patent free and this might be the one thing that screws it all up." Most days, I agree with this source that software patents are Bad Judu, but this case seems to be pointing out a kind of rough ironic justice.
Call me a curmudgeon, but anything whose burden falls most heavily on those designers who use plugins extensively can't be all bad. There are some technologies that should be free to everyone; patenting them and then releasing the patent into the public domain does the trick. And then there are some technologies that should be used by no one; patenting them and then locking up the patent does the trick. Automated browser plugins, I think, fall into one of these two categories. I just can't make up my mind which.