Accueil - End of the “Click to activate and use this control” today

Today the monthly Microsoft updates contains an update that will end the display of the message "Click to activate and use this control" and the surrounding yellow focus rectangle over Flash animations in Internet Explorer.

Remember the Eolas patent infringement suit against Microsoft. The patent Eolas claims to own is : "distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document". So that they own the patent that authorizes the user to directly interact with any embedded media in a webpage, like video players, Flash animations, java applet etc...

To avoid this patent violation, Microsoft adds a message and a surrounding yellow rectangle over each ActiveX control interface in Internet Explorer. By doing this, they force the user to first click the control before it can interact with, so the patent was not violated.

It was possible to avoid the violation of the patent by using a script to automatically preactivate the control, so that the user could directly interact with. In most cases Javascript script were used. Some distributed by Adobe with their software that generates Flash content, SWFObject, my temporary solution BackToTheHtml and many others...

Last year, Microsoft and Eolas reach an agreement so that Microsoft has officially announced that this will end the story.

So today every Windows users whom uses automatic Windows update will receive an update that will end the display of the message and surrounding yellow rectangle over each Flash animation with or without using scripts to embed the content.

In some cases this is really a good thing, I personally have problems using SWFobject (or any Javascript embedding method) with animations using NetConnection and SWFobject when pages are reloaded. This is a Flash Player bug that SWFobject try to correct but it do not. But I'm sure that most users will continue to use Javascript embedding method for now.