My Experience with “The Patch”
I just installed the IE Eolas Patch (KB912945) and I must say I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there about exactly what this patch will do. I’ve read in places that it will block your content, and prevent it from displaying. This isn’t true, at least in my experience.
After installing the patch and restarting my ugly ol’ PC, I launched up my site to make sure things still worked. The Flash slideshows still play automatically. The only difference in user experience is the fact that when a user places their mouse over the ActiveX area, they see a highlighted bounding box and a tooltip that reads “Click to activate this control.”
So, it seems that Flash content will still display, and Actionscript will still execute without user intervention. As far as I can tell, and correct me if I’m missing something, but this will not “break the web”, as some have said. It will just make life more annoying for Windows users. But hey, they’re Windows users, they’re used to it.
This makes me ask myself why Microsoft, with their uber-cash, doesn’t just settle this dispute? I guess Microsoft would rather sacrifice good user experience and save their money.
NOTE: Some have been asking how to obtain this patch. To get the patch, launch Windows Update, click “Custom Install”, choose “Optional Updates”, and then check the checkbox next to KB912945.
