Flash Activation in Microsoft Internet Explorer
I was working on a web design project the other day in Dreamweaver and I put in a Flash object into a web page. I've done this plenty of times in the past, with no problems.
Well, little to my knowledge, Microsoft recently released a security update to Microsoft Internet Explorer through Auto Update that disables Flash and other Applets by default. This can be seen by a grey box around the Flash object (on mouseover) and a tooltip displays that says "Click to activate and use this control".
My initial reaction was "WHAT THE 
!?!"
To cut a long story short, Microsoft had to do this because they were about to get sued by another company called Eolas Technologies. Apparently there was some kind of patent dispute based upon interactive content, so users will have to first click on your Flash content to 'activate' it before interacting with it. It was either do this, or M$ would have to dish out a ridiculous amount of cash.
Obviously, this will cause all sorts of usability problems for us developers, navigating websites which use a flash menu would be very difficult, and tedious, web sites built entirely in flash would be broken!
And its not just flash, no, according to what Microsoft says here, all applet, embed, and object elements will be disabled by default in Internet Explorer. (including IE7)
So whats the future of Flash? Well from what I can see thus far, people are starting calling it SWFObject. I'll discuss more on this in a later article.
Dec 27, 2006
Comments
I hope your solution isn't proprietary... 
We have the simple solution for elimination of a "Click to activate" IE problem!
http://www.flash-extensions.net/products/removing-ie-activation/
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