Click OK To Continue

Quick background for those of you who need it:

In 1999 Microsoft was sued by a company known as Eolas Technology, Inc. over a software patent the latter had licensed from the University of California. The patent, filed in 1994 and titled "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document", covered the ability of a user to view an embedded program object within a browser window. In other words, just about any plugin you can think of.

A few months ago it was ruled that Microsoft was in violation of the patent and Eolas was awarded $520 million in damages. Since then Microsoft has announced that it will appeal the ruling yet at the same time make what they term "modest changes" to both Internet Explorer and Windows in order to be in compliance with the trial verdict.

Recently they announced some of the changes that have been made to Internet Explorer to meet these requirements.

Of these changes the most noticable to the end user is the fact that every ActiveX control now pops up a dialog with the text "Press OK to continue loading the page" and a single "OK" button. (You can view a picture of it here) That's right, no "Cancel" button, no description of why you have to press OK, just a single non-informative line of text and one button.

Needless to say, I don't approve of this development.

There's a fine line between giving a user too much information and giving a user too little information. You don't want to overload and confuse them by giving them too much information that they can't make sense of it (i.e. an error dialog that shows a memory address or some cryptic debug statements), but at the same time you don't want to confuse them by providing far too little information. This dialog is a perfect example of the latter.

Additionally, the potential annoyance factor of this dialog is quite high seeing as it displays, not once for each page with an ActiveX control, but rather for every ActiveX control on the page that doesn't meet a narrow set of requirements. Anyone who's tried browsing the web using IE with ActiveX controls turned off can tell you that it's irritating enough being informed once per page about controls, imagine once per control.

It also makes you wonder whether this will create a conditioned response in the users. They read the first couple of dialogs, pressing "OK" when they do so. Eventually they stop reading the dialogs as thoroughly, and finally they just click "OK" without even bothering to consider what the dialog says. Now, imagine a malicious script that pops up a dialog with a request immediately upon the page loading. There is the potential that the user will automatically click "OK", having become accustomed to doing so. I don't think I need to further elaborate on what the potential consequences of such actions could be…

Now it's a fairly obvious fact that there's no love lost when it comes to me and Internet Explorer, a quick skim through my entries regarding stylesheets would confirm that. But I don't think this is a good thing. Not from a legal perspective, as it gives the patent holders precendent to go after other browsers, and not from an interface perspective.

…and with that the rant falls apart. This is where a conclusion should go, but I've never been good at them, especially when I'm working on 3 hours of sleep. All I can say is that I'm glad I use Mozilla and that I hope Eolas doesn't decide to set their sights on other browser manufacturers. Now I'm off to find me some lunch.

Quick note: As the patent applies to almost all plugins I'm unsure whether this affects just ActiveX or other plugins (such as Flash) as well. The info I found just mentioned ActiveX, but it could include others as well.