Solution to IE6’s ‘Click to activate Flash’ problem. A slightly geeky post.

I am not one to really talk about techy stuff (even though that is what I spend a lot of my day thinking about), but thought this might be helpful to others out there who have been wrestling with this issue.

The issue in question occurs in Internet Explorer (surprise!) when a flash movie embedded into a web page would only play once the user clicked on the movie to activate it. This is down to a security update that Microsoft released - initially as an optional update.

The workaround involves abandoning the traditional method of embedding Flash movies in a web page ( object or embed for example) and instead, using Javascript to bring the Flash movie in. A very useful guide to a number of workarounds can be found on Adobe’s website.

Flash used to be unaffected by the differences in the way different browsers displayed a web page. It’s a shame that, yet again, Internet Explorer is causing a few headaches.