Internet Explorer problem: Click to activate and use this control

You may have noticed that since updating Internet Explorer, you will see the message “Click to activate and use this control” before you can fully use a flash animation or menu on a web page. The animation itself and (unfortunately) sounds are still not affected but buttons and rollover effects will not work until you have activated it.

This is not just the case with embedded Flash files, but it is the same with anything that uses the <OBJECT> or <EMBED> HTML tags.

BELLonline fix to activate Flash files automatically

There are a few different fixes to this problem around including one from Macromedia, but this one works and takes less code as long as you only have one Flash file per page. The Macromedia fix is more challenging, but it is better if you have more than one Flash object per page, as it only uses one javascript file for all of your Flash animations.

You can see a working example of this fix in action at this website (the slider menu at the top of each page)

OK, lets get started…

Fill in the form below and you will be given some code to put in to your javascript file.

File name
The name of the file that you want to embed.
eg, flashmenu.swf
File ID
A unique ID for your Flash file.
eg, myanimation
Width pixels
Height pixels
Loop
Do you want the animation to loop? possible variables are
Can be true or false
Background colour
Background colour in hex. You can usually leave this as it is.