Disable IE’s Click to Activate and Use This Control
Posted by Matthew Hancock
Tutorials April 5th, 2007 at 7:53 pmMicrosoft has attempted to protect the general public by forcing each flash movie to be activated by a click before it can interact with your computer. Unfortunately, this “feature” of IE6+ has been causing problems for Flash developers who do not want their users to have to click their flash movie before it will play.
Fortunately, there is an easy solution. All you have to do is include two JavaScript files on your page and IE will stop bothering you… at least about this. These two files are part of the Roots Web Foundation created by Jordan Ambra.
Download the following two files and save them in a Scripts folder. Then add the following two lines of code in the <head> tag of the page that has your flash content on it.
<script src=”Scripts/ELO.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script src=”Scripts/Eolas.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
That’s it, problem solved! Enjoy!
April 6th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Credit for the ELO (Encapsulated Script Object) goes to Robert Nyman at http://robertnyman.com, used by permission in Roots.
April 29th, 2007 at 7:25 am
eolas.js has this line:
objects[i].outerHTML = objects[i].outerHTML;
That’s a no-op. Meaning, that script does nothing.
May 15th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Hi folks!
I developed other fix to disable IE’s Click here for active and use this control (and Opera browser).
http://jactivating.sourceforge.net
June 30th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
@Anon, the point of that line in the Eolas file is to dynamically add the object back into the page, which then bypasses the “Click to activate” problem. It’s not a no-op.
August 22nd, 2007 at 2:24 am
I included both the jscripts in my page.
And page does not display anything. Blank page appears.
After I removed both included scripts page is visible again.
September 2nd, 2007 at 6:28 am
These scripts do nothing in IE7 - ‘click to activate’ is still enabled. jActivating, however, works very well
January 10th, 2008 at 2:13 am
For some reason I can not see any effect of ELO script in my IE7 browser.
February 26th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Thanks for the link to jActivating. Fantastic!
March 10th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
There is a very easy way to embed flash etc. without the stupid click here to activate. Use javascript to actually embed the file! If you use an in your html it will ask you to click to activate. If you use Javascript to replace a div for example with the .swf it will not ask you to click. Check my page out, all the episodes are .swf files and none of them will ask you to click first
The media player playing the mp3’s will, but that’s using an < embed > tag. I actually didn’t even know about this, I just updated my code to be smaller and easier for me to administer and wow it doesn’t ask for click to activate 
Check this link out, it’s the SWFObject method of embedding. This is the one that does not require manual enabling of the embeds. http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/