Having problems with your flash?
There is a company, Eolas, that has a patent on certain internet technology. This technology essentially is the object and embed tags. Recently, they filed a lawsuit against Microsoft for infringement of the IE browser. Basically, the company said they own these tags and if Microsoft wants to use them they have to pay. The company wants like 500 MILLION for Microsoft to use it. Now, I don’t necessarily claim to understand the whole issue, but it sure is a pain.
From what I’ve read, the patent has been looked at as not valid and may get thrown out. But this will be several years down the road and will cause us problems until then. In the meantime, a judge has ruled in Eolas’ favor and told Microsoft to pay or change their browser. Microsoft said fine, we’ll change the browser and dispute this. Personally, I don’t blame them. Eolas isn’t suing Apple Safari or Opera for these issues, only Microsoft.
Now, though, the newest updates to the browser cause the flash to be inactive on load. You need to click it to activate it. If you use flash for navigation, you have to click the flash before it will allow you to click it for navigation. It also seems to put a box around the flash, which looks bad and is annoying.
A lot of people are getting mad and blaming Microsoft for this. That’s a little unfair as they haven’t had much choice. Regardless of how much money you had, would you want to give (what looks like a money grubbing company) 500 Million dollars? I wouldn’t.
There is a way around this:
http://www.thinkydinky.com/click_to_activate_and_use_this_control.html
We have sucessfully used this technique. There is no way we want to go into all the projects and websites we’ve done and programmed and retro-actively fix this though. Should I eat that cost or pass it on to the client or send a bill to Microsoft or Eolas? None are good or favorable choices.
Anyway, you will have to decide how to handle this for each client/site. Here are a couple other links to take a look at.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1490621,00.asp
http://www.eolas.com/zmapress.htm
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1737809,00.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas