“Click to activate and use this control” or “Embedding Media gets an Extra Dose of Annoying”

  microsoft, eolas, activex, flash, annoying horrible update problem, click to activate and use this control

So basically Microsoft lost a lawsuit against a company called Eolas a long time ago; and now, unless you change your code and upload a certain script to your root directory, your Interactive Flash won’t work and will just look like a static image. Of course, if you hold your mouse over it for 2 seconds you’ll get a little “Click to activate and use this control” message, which effectively murders the convenience of the single click concept. This pleases me to no end, since it means I must change the code in every one of my music posts, and in doing so, manage to lose the review for Tokyo Police Club!

Apparently I missed the early warnings, so this issue seems to have only taken effect for me recently, like today? I have been able to use single clicks when checking in other browsers until recently. I did update Opera yesterday, so that might have kicked it in, but suddenly the problem is showing up in Firefox and IE as well, and on other computers, so I don’t know…

This is very excellent because it seems to mean that every piece of Flash and/or embedded media on the internet must be changed! The community is being brought together on a global scale by magnificent annoyance!

If you are having problems with embedded media doing this in your own sites, the following links have a few different fixes to the problem, which will allow you to configure your own content to bypass this little problem:

[“Quick and dirty” fix for “Click to activate and use this control” problem]
[Macromedia Flash Specific (and much more complicated) solution]
[Adobe article with another solution]

I used the first one, since WordPress apparently has issues with the Macromedia way, and the first solution is way easier anyway…
If you have any problems, just comment and let me know, and I’ll try to help you out.

Happy Fixing! (I’m not the only one having this issue right?!)