Removing Internet Explorer’s Active Content Warning on Flash Objects

By  on  

A couple of years ago Internet Explorer cause millions of programmers and users alike a giant pain by making users click on a flash object, ActiveX object, and java applet before the object became active and usable. Businesses, of course, cried out for their programmers to fix the problem and programmers pulled their hair out for weeks. As one of those programmers, I can tell you that businesses wont take "Microsoft screwed things up" for an answer and luckily I found a solution that works without requiring that the user do anything.

The solutions requires the use a small JavaScript file strategically placed immediately after the Flash object's </object> tag.

The File

flash-fix.js

The Code

Simply code your <object> code as usual:


width="200" height="100">





name="my_animcation" width="200" height="100" src="graphics/myanimation.swf" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" quality="high" swliveconnect="true" allowscriptaccess="samedomain">

That's all you have to do. The JavaScript code grabs the object and sets the object's outerHTML equal to itself, thus nullifying IE's effort to annoy the user.

Recent Features

  • By
    39 Shirts &#8211; Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools: Set Style Per Media

    I'd bet one of the most used MooTools methods is the setStyle() method, which allows you to set CSS style declarations for an element. One of the limitations of MooTools' setStyle() method is that it sets the specific style for all medias.

  • By
    Record Text Selections Using MooTools or jQuery AJAX

    One technique I'm seeing more and more these days (CNNSI.com, for example) is AJAX recording of selected text. It makes sense -- if you detect users selecting the terms over and over again, you can probably assume your visitors are searching that term on Google...

Discussion

  1. Ben Hernandez

    These directions are not clear for a non-programmer. Can you help me? I’m using Dreamweaver 8.

  2. Wow that code fixed my problem. Thank you so much!

  3. hi, i was trying to solve this problem, and i couldn’t download the flash-fix script… would you please upload it again? thx

  4. Kenneth Armstrong

    I was a little confused by this. What is the code and where to I place it exactly?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!