November 8, 2007 – Important update: As a result of recent technology licenses acquired by Microsoft, Microsoft plans to remove the "click to activate" activation behavior from Internet Explorer in April 2008. After the update, controls will function as they did before the activation change was made in April 2006. For more information: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/activecontent/faq.html

If you want to accomodate users who haven't updated their Microsoft Internet Web Browser then this web page is for you.

When viewing Flash content in Internet Explorer you'll see a text box that says, "Click to activate and use this control" when you hover your mouse over the Flash movie. Users have to click on the Flash movie before they can interact with it even though animations still work. This annoying "feature" is due to a lawsuit that Microsoft lost with Eolas and the delivery of active content. For more information regarding this refer to:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=7c29e252&sliceId=2

To get around this issue there are different ways of calling flash objects through javascript instead of the preferred method that Dreamweaver uses for flash by default.

Here we will show how to use a free program from http://www.flashrelease.com to run through a website folder, look for all the files with embeded Flash swf files, change the html and add some javascript to make Flash movies. I have used this program with no problems, however use this program at your own risk. GRX Solutions, LLC holds no responisiblity whatsoever. There are other programs that do the same type of thing as well.

In the image below you will see the "Click to activate and use this control" dialog box along with a grey border around the entire flash movie. You must click once on the flash movie to allow it to except mouse or keyboard input. This is the annoying problem we're going to solve here.

Here is the code that Dreamweaver creates when a Flash movie (in this case the Graston Technique Slide Show) is put on a blank web page. All the code between the <object> and </object> tags is for the Flash movie. This code is what needs modifying to avoid the "Click to Activate" dialog box.

Here is the main screen for the Flash Release program http://www.flashrelease.com. First, hit the "Browse" button, then select the directory where your website resides, then hit "Search Documents". A list of documents with embeded Flash content will show up. Keep the files checkmarked that you want to change and hit "Process". The files will be modified and an extra folder with to javascript files will be added to the website directory. Files will be backed up and the extension will be changed. For example test.html will be backed up as test.old and so on.

The software from Flash Release is nice in that it can be run over and over again on the same website and it only shows you the web pages that don't have the modifications made. This way if you add new Flash content you simply run it again and it will automatically find the new Flash files and only change those files.