JXL on “Teh Patch”

Neurofuzzy had a good write up about his experience with the IE Eolas patch Microsoft is distributing, so I figured I’d write up on mine too. I also had wrote up about 4 paragraphs in the past hour whining about how I hate it, but suffice it to say, all of my existing Flash & Flex content, while playable, requires an extra click to “get it to work”. The banner at the top of my site, my comments app to this blog post, and even my little “Copy to Clipboard” trackback link movie at the end of this post all no longer work like they should in IE. They display just fine, you can see them, but when you go to click in a field to write something or click a button in IE… you have to click twice.

That’s sad… for me because all of my Flex & Flash content is now broken user experience wise, and for users who have to deal with all of the sites NOT fixed by using the JavaScript workarounds such as Microsoft’s solutions, FlashObject, or Adobe’s hotfix for Flex 1.5. Do you think Eolas would pay the invoices I send to them for having to add code to my personal & professional projects? I think out of spite I’ll bill them for my time.

I applaud Microsoft for battling this patent, for implementing this change vs. the former one, and for using this as a line in the sand early. Eolas, however, has left a scar on the Internet, and the ingenuity of programmers has managed to dramatically reduce the casulaties. Go JavaScript.

Still, I’m sad. I use Firefox, but most of my clients don’t, nor do millions of users. As the script implementations increase, so to will the damage’s visbility disappear so there is a silver lining. History will hopefully view this as the US patent system gone horribly wrong with implications to have gone even worse and learn from it.