Back in issue 68, I had a bit of a rant about how Microsoft Internet Explorer is fast becoming the biggest thorn in the side of modern Web design. Well, Microsoft tells us that it's about to get more annoying, thanks to a recent lawsuit involving the way plug-ins work in the browser.

Eolas Technologies Inc. is the company that first invented and now owns the rights to external programs running seamlessly within a Web browser. Never heard of them? Don't feel bad -- neither had I until their recent legal action against Microsoft. But way back in 1994 they demonstrated the technology with a modified version of the NCSA Mosaic 2.4 browser and patented the technology so that big companies like Microsoft couldn't take it away from them. In 1995, they released their own browser called WebRouser, which demonstrated the technology.

As the owners of the technology, they are entitled to require licensing fees of any company that wants to implement their own version of the technology in their products. The recent legal battle was to determine if Microsoft should have paid those fees, or if (as it claims) it developed the plug-in technology on their own before Eolas filed for the patent.

Well, Microsoft lost the case. But rather than pay the licensing fees on the technology, it has decided to modify Internet Explorer so that it no longer infringes on the patent. Unfortunately, these changes mean that every plug-in on a page (i.e. Flash movies, Java applets, PDF documents, etc.) will require the user to click click on a message box like this one as the page is loading.

Pretty annoying, huh? Microsoft has published complete details of the changes it will make in upcoming service packs to Internet Explorer, along with a pre-release version of Internet Explorer with the changes in place. These new documents explain a number of different ways to modify pages that use plug-ins so that the Eolas patent does not apply, and the prompt is not displayed.

The simplest method is to write the tag(s) that load the plug-in dynamically from an external JavaScript file. So say you have the following code in your page:

<object data="movie.swf" width="100" height="100" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"> 
<param name="movie" value="movie.swf" /> 
<embed src="movie.swf" width="100" height="100" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /> 
</object>

To avoid the message box prompt as the page is loading, you need to replace this code with a reference to an external JavaScript file:

<script type="text/javascript" src="flash.js"> 
</script> 
<script type="text/javascript"> 
showFlash('movie.swf',100,100); 
</script>

Inside that flash.js file, you need to write the plug-in tags dynamically:

function showFlash(src, width, height) { 
document.writeln( 
'<object data="' + src + '" width="' + 
width + '" height="' + height + 
'" type="application/x-shockwave-flash">'); 
document.writeln( 
'<param name="movie" value="' + src + 
'" />'); 
document.writeln( 
'<embed src="' + src + '" width="' + 
width + '" height="' + height + 
'" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" />'); 
document.writeln('</object>'); 
}

Pretty straightforward, but really annoying if you use a lot of plug-ins on your site, or if you use server-side code to generate your plug-in tags dynamically.

Things would certainly be simpler for us developers if Microsoft simply paid for the license for the plug-in technology, but it has repeatedly denied that Eolas' claim to the technology is valid, and that even if it were it's asking far too much for the license.

Of course, Internet Explorer isn't the only browser that supports seamless loading of plug-ins. In an interview, Eolas founder Michael Doyle has stated that they will continue to offer free licenses for non-commercial implementations of the technology (which presumably includes the Mozilla Project).

Browser vendors like Opera and Apple may have to consider their options, however.