IE 6.0 yellow highlighted word autotext links.. ?!?!?

[Conundrum]

I downloaded 6.0 to see what it's like and now on any text displayed in my web browser, certain words and key word combinations brings up this yellow text. It overlays the hyperlink if it happens to be sitting on one and pulls up the little pop-up help window which tells you the link where the yellow highlighted portion will take you. It's a bunch of lame advertising that points to different businesses online.

I didn't see any options within the tools or anywhere else for that matter to toggle this option. Is this something that we're forced to endure if we intend to run 6.0? Or is this some lame virus/worm thing that I have which only impacts IE 6.0? I'm quite confused by it.. and any input would be appreciated. Beyond it being annoying, it doesn't seem to do anything else.

 

[lucidguy]

These are called "smart links". Instead of advertising properly on its websites (such as the MSN portal, Hotmail, Expedia, and what have you) Microsoft has decided to co-opt the entire Internet to serve as their advertising space.

Whenever you display a web page in IE 6.0, Microsoft will analyze all the words on the page, query an internal or external database (probably using some kind of dynamic caching solution) in order to determine if anyone has paid Microsoft to get a special link on any word on that page. If Microsoft has received payment from someone to link, say, "jacket" to a jacket-selling website, IE 6.0 will do so. It doesn't matter that the original author of the web site may absolutely refuse to link to said etailer. It doesn't matter that the original author of the web site may have wanted to link the word "jacket" to some other site. Microsoft will do a complete run-around and create unauthorized derivative works of all web sites all over the Internet, for the noble goal of selling a few more frigging ads and improving their bottom line.

Not only is this unethical, it is very clearly illegal. But what's another lawsuit when the US government, 19 states, and thousands of current and former employees are already suing you?

Theoretically, this "feature" is supposed to be optional. But as you have seen, Microsoft is toying around with the idea of making it mandatory.

 

[Escalade]

I haven?t really been following IE6?s development, but this is the first time I?ve heard about this ?feature?!

My first reaction...

That'll never fly!!!

Can you imagine going to on-line Store-ABC to buy a "jacket" only to be rerouted to Store-XYZ when you click on the word "jacket" ?!

 

[MasterHoss]

speaking of it, how is IE6 doing right now? worth downloading? Crashing your stable Win2k machine?

 

[Conundrum]

IE 6.0 is fine on my ME and Win2k partitions (FAT32/NTFS). I only installed it on this one rig because I wanted to see what kind of problems I might encounter. The one glaring problem I run into with it beyond the incredibly annoying yellow highlighting is how it will detect and present HTML bug windows on sites that don't register at all with 5.5 on my other rigs.

I wouldn't recommend downloading 6.0. I'm going to stick with 5.5.