deconcept
September 27 2006
I’ve noticed, of late, that whenever I hover over a Flash element on one of my website pages in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer a tooltip pops up with the text, “Click to activate and use this control.”
Being concerned that this feature would impede the usability of my pages and wanting to turn it off in IE I turned to Google and came across these pages explaining it:
- http://www.adobe.com/devnet/activecontent/articles/devletter.html
- http://www.amarasoftware.com/flash-problem.htm
- http://www.google.com/search?q=%22click+to+activate+and+use+this+control%22+ie+&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
The gist is that, due to a patent dispute with Eolas Technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas), Microsoft has changed the functionality of embedded controls so that they must be “activated” before they can be used. The above links suggest ways to get around the tooltip - most involving using javascript to embed the control and thus getting around the feature - but there is no way to turn off the functionality short of uninstalling the Microsoft update that activated it.
The bottom line for me is that I might need to look further into this solution: deconcept
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