How to get rid of "click to activate and use this control" prompt for Flash in IE?

Question

Our client is getting "click to activate and use this control" over our Flash component in IE. What's a good fix?

Thanks

EDIT:

Is this something that SWFObject fixes? We're using the standard Flash embed code...

Answer 1

There's plenty of drop-in workaround scripts to automate the bypass of the click-to-activate garbage. This was the first result in a quick googling: http://www.mix-fx.com/flash-prompt.htm

Background: Microsoft got sued by a patent troll over embedded "active" content in a page. But the patent only covered stuff that activate automatically (e.g. on page load). So Microsoft add the click-to-activate workaround to bypass the patent's coverage.

Standard fixes are to use Javascript to loop over all the object elements in a page and basically do:

obj.outerHTML = obj.outerHTML

on each one, which is enough to appease the workaround's requirements and limit the patent trolls to only a dozen Ferraris each.

Answer 2

You have to embed your SWF with external code. SWFObject is the de-facto standard for that (and overall it makes the whole embedding much simpler).