ActiveX Solutions for Flash Content

There are three HTML pages here, intended to demonstrate three different ways to embed a Flash movie (.swf) in a Web page so that it will work with IE 6, which in April 2006 changed to make embedded content non-functional unless you click on it first.

Each of the three pages loads exactly the same SWF (juice.swf -- link will not open in IE 6, but it will open in other browsers). When this SWF is loaded properly (e.g., in the Firefox, Safari or Opera browsers), as you just roll over it, the orange fruit replaces your cursor. You can move it around the screen and try to avoid hitting the floating juice machine.

In Microsoft's IE 6 browser, the SWF does not work UNLESS you click on it first.

So COMPARE these three examples in IE to see the difference.

• Regular OBJECT code
  This is the normal, old way to put a SWF on a Web page. This is the one that DOES NOT WORK in the new updated IE 6 browser (unless you CLICK the Flash movie; then it will work).
• Using the Flash 8 Updater from Macromedia
  Read more about this here.
• Using the SWFObject from Geoff Sterns
  I think this is the best solution. It provides reliable Flash player version detection in addition to fixing the ActiveX problem in IE 6.

View Source on the example pages to see the HTML, all the CSS, and most of the JavaScript. Get the SWFObject JavaScript here. Get the Flash 8 Updater here.

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