Many of you may remember the fuss over a year ago when Microsoft had to change the way Internet Explorer treated embedded objects due to the technology infringing on patents by Eolas. So in April 2006 this technology was removed from IE6, and did not appear in IE7 and so in most circumstances the user had to click to activate the embedded control for it to start rather than it automatically appearing on the page and being usable. Now though this is about to change.
Reported on IEBlog, they have now licensed the technology so that IE may once again behave like other browsers when it comes to embedded objects - they will now be usable from page load automatically.
| Before April 2006 | After April 2006 | After April 2008 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Controls Injected Via JavaScript | No "Click to activate" | No "Click to activate" | No "Click to activate" |
| Controls loaded Direct In HTML (object, embed, applet) | No "Click to activate" | "Click to activate" required | No "Click to activate" |
So there we have it, as of April 2008 the ActiveX update that disabled automatic activation of objects will be removed by an update so that IE can once again function with some degree of common sense.
