Click To Activate And Use This Control

So, you browse to a website, and you see some interesting looking Flash content, or a video. You want to interact with it, but on mousing over the item in Internet Explorer you get this message “Click to activate and use this control”. or perhaps “Press ok to continue loading the content of this page”.

Damn, that’s annoying. Well, basically, Microsoft lost a patent dispute with Eolas, reagrding embedding media in webpages. This means they’ve ‘updated’ your computer to require this click for any interaction with embedded media.

So! What can you do?

I could go into lengthy discussions about webmasters updating code (links to follow), or I could say “live with it”…which would be harsh.

The simplest fix for this is to merely install Firefox. Eolas don’t have an issue with free and open, well written software.

Over 50 percent of people visiting this site already use Firefox.
Firefox works just like IE, only better, faster, and with more interesting features….and you don’t have to click every time you want to see something interesting online.

So. I will be blogging on the methods of updating your pages shortly, but for now the fix is simple.

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Tags: annoying, browsers, Flash, IE, patents