Click to activate and use this control

30 Apr 2006

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‘Microsoft has recently lost a patent dispute with Eolas Technologies, relating to “automated interactive experience” and the use of plug-ins in web browsers.

As a result Internet Explorer has been modified so users cannot directly interact with ActiveX controls which are loaded by via the APPLET, EMBED, or OBJECT elements. Instead the browser prompts users to “click to activate” before they can access the extra functionality.

This will affect any site which relies on a web-browser’s ability to automatically launch and display content via a plugin such as Flash. At the moment only Internet Explorer has been modified, but other browsers are going to have to follow its path.

Work Arounds
The updated browser only prompts users to activate object, embed and applet tags that are inline in an HTML file. So the webpages use tags which have been generated by external script files (like javascript), will continue to work normally with no change. So any page which is already using javascript to detect the flash plugin (most of mine) should be fine. Not sure how long this state of affairs will continue.

See Also

javascript tree

8 Feb 2006


‘I’ve been using the dtree DHTML script as part of a menu-building tool for clients.
Destroydrop Javascripts Tree Easy to generate the script from a database, which isn’t true of a lot of similar tools.