Back in April 2006, we made a change to how Internet Explorer handled embedded controls used on some webpages. Some sites required users to “click to activate” before they could interact with the control. Microsoft has now licensed the technologies from Eolas, removing the “click to activate” requirement in Internet Explorer. Because of this, we’re removing the “click to activate” behavior from Internet Explorer!
My question is why such a customer-hostile situation was allowed to exist for a year and a half.
Anyway, here’s a half-hearted “woo hoo” on behalf of the removal of this silly roadblock.
Ed Bott 
Uhh, because our backwards Patents system allows nobody companies to come along and claim rights to such basic functionality as interactive elements in a webpage and then pop up at random to “claim” those rights?
I imagine it lasted for a year and a half because Eolas thought this was a great opportunity to “license” this technology for an enormous sum of cash. Whether Microsoft finally gave in or was finally able to get them down to a more reasonable price, who knows…
I don’t understand the problem. Is this any different than other things that happen with IE like click to download or activate an ActiveX control?