G’day,
There is a workaround …
Before I start this, here’s the standard blurb…
Play with this at your own risk. It works, but I will not accept responsibility for anything you might do to break your site.
There have been complaints of late that IE is acting a bit strangely whenever objects appear in pages in that is displays a message, something to the effect of, “Click to activate control.”
On 2 December, 2005, Microsoft announced (Microsoft Learn: Build skills that open doors in your career) that there are changes to the way Internet Explorer handles plugins.
While the announcement is old (in Internet time), many web developers are unaware of this. If you have a web site that use plugins, the functionality changes work like this:
When using an applet, object, or embed tag to insert a plugin into an HTML document, that plugin will not allow user interaction until the user clicks on it. Microsoft calls this process “Activating an ActiveX Control’s Interface.” When you visit a site that uses a flash plugin, run your mouse pointer over the object a thin border appear around it and, of you leave your pointer over the object you’ll see a message telling you click to activate that object.
In the case of the Flash plugin, it means that your Flash movies will not work until a user ‘activates’ it first by clicking on it. This is a slight improvement over the previous ‘fix’ which was a small dialog prompt for each ActiveX control on a page. Now you just have to click on each control to activate it (if you want to interact with it). The site isn’t broken, really - it just means that you have the IE security updates, from Microsoft, installed.
Microsoft says “We believe over the next six months, most customers will be running copies of Internet Explorer with this behavior.” (http://news.com.com/Microsoft+tweaks+browser+to+avoid+liability/2100-1012_3-5980658.html)
The changes are rolling into IE 6 through security updates to Windows, and included in IE 7.
Thankfully, Microsoft offers a fairly easy way around all this nonsense: Embed your Flash movies using Javascript.
One such fix is to use swfobject.
If you’re interested, head over to the FlashObject page (SWFObject: Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script | deconcept) and start using it. If you are using quicktime, you can always use a QTObject script (Web standards compliant Javascript Quicktime detect and embed | deconcept) which works the same way that FlashObject does, but for the Quicktime plugin (there’s also plugin fixes for the Mac). The instructions on how to install the ‘fix’ code on web pages is on the FlashObject page (SWFObject: Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script | deconcept)
hope this helps,
ewen 