Well, in the spirit of my last post, I thought I’d mention this. I noticed some time ago that IE7 requires the user to click on a flash movie to “activate the ActiveX Control”. Grey boxes appear around all plugin content, (including Quicktime and Flash), and one way or another you must click to load the active content.

I hadn’t given it much thought, but this morning a client brought it up in reference to his site-in-progress. (And when a client mentions something like this, it instantly becomes critically important.) Anyway, I looked into it, and apparently this whole deal stems from a recent patent dispute between Microsoft and Eolas Technologies, a tiny little tech company. The David vs. Goliath aspect is frustrating when deciding where to place blame, but no worries! The fix is atypically easy.

The change affects just the object tag and embed pseudotag. The fix is as simple as using a javascript embed to call the flash movie. Here’s where to get the .js file and instructions. It was a free library called flashobject, but now it’s called swfobject. I mention this because Adobe forced the name change, essentially propagating the some brand of lawsuit-crazy bullcrap onto the generous programmer who created the gold-standard fix to the Eolas Problem (I love the sound of that…we should start calling it the Eolas Paradox).

In any case, the fix is very cool. It is valid (unlike the embed tag), and includes cool features for version testing and autoupdating. Go check it out, and get converting!