TechNote

Internet Explorer displays a box around Flash content

Issue

Note: As of April 2008, Microsoft has removed all Active Content requirements from Internet Explorer.The information in this TechNote is supplied for historical reference to the period from April 2006 to April 2008. For details on Microsoft's deprecation of Active Content, see MSDN. For details of Adobe's Active Content workarounds see the Adobe Active Content Developer Center.

Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows displays a box around Flash content and a tooltip telling the user to click to activate the content. Flash content may or may not play as expected. After clicking within box, the Flash content can receive user input and behaves as expected.

Reason

In April 2006, Microsoft released an update to Internet Explorer that changes how it handles active content--such as that viewed in Adobe Flash Player, Authorware Player, Shockwave Player and Adobe Reader, as well as Sun Java, Apple QuickTime, RealNetworks, RealPlayer and other ActiveX controls. Active content that is embedded in HTML pages in certain ways may not be able to receive user input (for example, keyboard or mouse events) until the user clicks to either activate or continue loading the control.

Note: These changes were deprecated in April 2008 (see MSDN for a complete list of effected Internet Explorer versions and OS versions).

Solution

Flash Player end users who have applied the update to Internet Explorer will experience this behavior with websites that have not yet updated their content, but only if they are using an effected version of Internet Explorer as described above.

Website developers may wish to update their site to remove the user activation requirement for active content in Internet Explorer's effected versions. For details of Adobe's Active Content workarounds see the Adobe Active Content Developer Center.

Ideally developers may wish to use a script-based detection to determine if their end users are viewing their site with an effected version of Internet Explorer, delivering Active Content workarounds to those users only. However, sites already updated for Active Content workarounds will continue to work as expected after the April 2008 updates to Internet Explorer.

Note: As of the October 15, 2008 release of Flash Player 10, Adobe recommends that developers use SWFObject2 for Flash Player detection.

For more information, see the SWFObject page at Google code: http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/ or "Detecting Flash Player versions and embedding SWF files with SWFObject 2" on the Adobe Developer Connection website. The following information effects the Flash Player Detection Kit, which should continue to work correctly with Flash Player 10.