Thanks to John Dowdell, it appears the IE/no-Flash development is not as serious as originally reported by marketing.fm. Please see below:
(Q) Will advertisements be affected?
(A) Because most ad servers use an external script-based mechanism for detecting and serving Flash, they already employ a technique proposed by Microsoft for activating active content. To learn more about the expected changes to Internet Explorer and Microsoftâs proposed solutions for active content, please see the MSDN article.â?
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/activecontent/faq.html#item-1-7
Original Post:
As reported by Adotas from email, Microsoft officially announced the suspension of flash technology for all those who use Internet Explorer software. Microsoft has been involved in an ongoing patent dispute with Eolas Technologies since 2004. Despite numerous appeals, the struggle continues. This will essentially put a halt on all “Flash-based” media across the web for IE users.
While a suspension of “Flash” may sound dire for interactive advertising, it could also be temporary relief from annoying advertisements for web surfers. Furthermore, the problem will be easily fixed through a patch that is already available. More information can be found here.
More importantly, what are the implications? From an advertising standpoint, some paid media will certainly be affected and pre-empted given the widespread use of Internet Explorer. In addition, this issue may result in more users switching to alternative browsers such as Firefox which has been growing browser market share.
Watch this space closely as things will change quickly given the fact that multiple sides to this battle have dynamic flash inventory running out on the internet right now.
Insight: Microsoft may be happy about this “block” in support of its supposed Flash killer
Links tracking the story:
eWeek
Technorati Tags: interactive advertising, marketing.fm, marketing, ie, ie flash, flash advertising, firefox
March 3rd, 2006 at 5:48 pm
It doesn’t block “ALL” flash usage. In fact, it only blocks inpage flash usage that loads the flash player or swf file from within the page source. To fix this, simply load your flash into your page from JavaScript as it’s technically a seperate file. I work for a big ad serving company and that fix is straight from our engineering team. Trust me, our thousands of customers would be in a world of hurt if ALL flash was blocked.
March 3rd, 2006 at 5:53 pm
There’s always SVG. It’s not a perfect Flash replacement, but with the right tools there’s no doubt it could handle a lot of the same tasks but also be more integrated with html.
March 3rd, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Hi, if you’ll check the comments on that Adotas article, you’ll see that the browser-change is actually less onerous than this. Most advertisers already use some type of dynamic JavaScript write of the HTML tags in question, and so will not be affected. Here’s the pertinent section from the Adobe FAQ on the subject:
“(Q) Will advertisements be affected?
“(A) Because most ad servers use an external script-based mechanism for detecting and serving Flash, they already employ a technique proposed by Microsoft for activating active content. To learn more about the expected changes to Internet Explorer and Microsoft’s proposed solutions for active content, please see the MSDN article.”
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/activecontent/faq.html#item-1-7
For other SWF content, which does not use the prohibited browser JavaScript, the content will still display normally, but will just require a click in the plugin area to start processing user interactivity. A dynamic write of the HTML tags via JavaScript will avoid even this impact. Much more information in general, from a plugin-oriented point-of-view, is available at the Adobe Active Content Development Center:
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/activecontent/
May 19th, 2006 at 7:22 am
another reason to switch to firefox/opera?