Flash limitations in IE6 and IE7
UPDATE - As of April 13, 2006, Microsoft has included this patch in the ‘critical updates’ section of WindowsUpdate, so the adoption rate of this patch is very likely to soar.
It is important to start updating your Flash embedding technique as Microsofts’ patch 912945, which limits initial interaction with ActiveX plugins in Internet Explorer 6, will be more and more common in the future and will be included by default in Internet Explorer 7.
Why does Microsoft release such a patch, as it only seems to hinder user interaction with well known (and trusted) plugins such as Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer and Sun Java? It all comes down to the EOLAS patent, a legal affair between Microsoft on one side and the University of California and its licensee Eolas Technologies Inc on the other.
The patent describes a technique to embed programs in hypertext documents, much like data is embedded in HTML. The patent also says that no user interaction is required to start using the embedded program. This is exactly what the <object> tag does and that’s what Eoloas sues Microsoft for.
The patch released by Microsoft alters the way Internet Explorer handles embedded programs such as Flash Player and Quicktime. What happens is that user interaction with the embedded object is switched ‘off’ by default. A gray border and an explanatory tooltip appear when the user hovers the mouse over the object. After clicking the object, interaction is enabled:
In the two screenshots above I have illustrated the effect of this change. The top image shows a Flash movie embedded in an HTML page. The next image shows the gray border and the tooltip that appear.
The remedy to this is simple: the patent says the object has to be embedded inline in the document. This means that embedding the document through an external (Java)script is a perfectly legal way to circumvent the claims made by University of California and Eolas Technologies Inc. When you embed plugins through an external script, Internet Explorer will not show the gray border and tooltip, but will enable the plugin immediately instead and let it behave like we’re used to.
I highly recommend using Geoff Stearns’ FlashObject SWFObject to embed your Flash content with in your HTML documents. It’s not just an Eolas-proof and XHTML valid method, it’s also a very elegant and clean solution, which I have been using for quite some time now and very much to my satisfaction. Geoff wrote a similar Javascript to embed Quicktime, as did Apple.
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