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Click to activate and use this control

You may have started seeing tooltip text that reads 'Click to activate and use this control' or 'Press SPACEBAR or ENTER to activate and use this control' whenever you open a Flash web page. Worse still, the Flash page will not work until you actually click the Flash content. This makes many (all?) Flash sites appear broken...

You will see this new 'feature' if you have Windows update enabled and you use Internet Explorer. Microsoft have added this feature after losing a legal battle with Eolas.

The feature actually has no practical use (its not a security measure) and has occurred purely because of a legal issue.

The background issue revolves around the use of plugins on a webpage, which Eolas claim patents on. Any content that is included within a web page via the applet, object or embed tags will be affected, and this includes Flash. It is important that you fix this issue for any Flash sites you are maintaining because the user cannot disable this new operation through their browser. You have been warned!

There is a fix for this issue here.

Update June 2006
Macromedia have released a (flash 8) fix for the Active X issue... download here.

Posted by motiongraphics at 11:47 AM | Comments (27)