Does Eolas Lawsuit Mean the Death of Flash Ads?

This was buried in a NY Times article entitled:Setback for Microsoft Ripples Through the World Wide Web

The consortium organized a four-hour meeting on Aug. 19 at the San Francisco offices of Macromedia, a producer of software for showing animations on the Web. Those invited were the leading producers of multimedia Internet and Java applications, including Real Networkscoei, Sun Microsystemscoei, Apple Computercoei and Adobecoei, as well as Macromediacoei.

Microsoft proposed three possible design tweaks to its browsing software to ensure compliance with the court ruling. These include having personal computer users approve a "click to proceed'' box to run multimedia programs from the browser and modifications that other software companies and Web page designers can make. All would require some adjustments from companies, executives say, but should not affect ordinary PC users significantly.

If the customer had to click on a Flash ad, it would mean the death of them. The reason why there are Flash ads is to animate (and make noises) without the customer's consent. If we want to run a Flash application, one click is not much of a hassle. Combine this with the pop-up block on the Google toolbar (yeah!), and we might gain control of our desktop again.

Comments

[*** Dave]

Hey, I combine both. PopUpCop not only blocks popups, it blocks Flash execution (though not download), though I can always just click on the box and have the Flash run.

[Rich]

Cool! One of the annoying things about Google's popup blocker is that when you press a button on the Links bar it thinks it is an unwanted pop up. Does PopupCop do that also? This is annoying while blogging.

[Rich]

I tried it out and it did what I wanted for not blocking the quick post bookmarklet. Thanks, Dave.

[George]

Actually, most of modern ad servers make use of the javascript document.write method to display ads. Such external javascript is recommended workaround to avoid that stupid "click to proceed" popups. So love it or not, the Flash ads will survive even without major system fixes.

[Benjamin]

I use No!Flash while surfing, and it prevents ALL Macromedia Flash ads, animated Gifs, pop-ups, and Javascript. VERY nice when going to sites like news.com.com (cnet), cnn.com, weather.com, and others that like to throw crap all over the screen. It does disable features here (like the auto-jump when you select the forum from the dropdown bar, and the animated smileys), but I can live without those features. It also impacts some other sites I frequent (banking, UPS shipping, etc), so I do have to turn it on and off, depending on what I'm doing. I no longer get 'do you want to download Macromedia Flash' either. If I want to re-enable the features, it's a click of the mouse, fire off a new browser, and it's good to go again. http://www.geocities.jp/baryonlee/noflash/ to download.