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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Is it 1993 again?
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Jeffrey Zeldman reports on the upshot of the Eolas suit - ON Windows, users of IE could see plugins (pretty much all plugins) cease to work:
Besides paying over half a billion dollars to the patent holder, Microsoft is supposed to cripple its market-leading browser so that IE/Windows will no longer seamlessly play Flash, Quicktime, RealVideo, or Adobe Acrobat files, Java applets, and other rich media formats. Once the company does this, any site that uses these technologies will no longer work in the browser most people use.
Before you start dancing in the streets at MS getting hammered, step back and realize that this patent applies to more than just IE - it applies to all browsers, regardless of vendor or platform. If Eolas pushes this further (and why wouldn't they?), we could see the net return to all the power we had in 1993. And it's not just browser developers that are going to take it in the shorts. If this holds up, sites everywhere are going to have to change the way they deliver content in order to work with the new (crippled) IE. Go read Zeldman for full details - this just stinks.
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