Have you been frustrated with the extra click on IE when you need to interact with an embedded Flash? The good news is the IE team has finally made the decision to reverse this annoying behaviour back to what it was before on IE6, no more annoying “click to activate”. This was release on IEBlog today:
Back in April 2006, we made a change to how Internet Explorer handled embedded controls used on some webpages. Some sites required users to “click to activate” before they could interact with the control. Microsoft has now licensed the technologies from Eolas, removing the “click to activate” requirement in Internet Explorer. Because of this, we’re removing the “click to activate” behavior from Internet Explorer!
It’s important (and cool) to note that this change will require no modifications to existing webpages, and no new actions for developers creating new pages. We are simply reverting to the old behavior. Once Internet Explorer is updated, all pages that currently require “click to activate” will no longer require the control to be activated. They’ll just work.
It looks like we won’t be able to get this fix until April of 2008. So far it is planed to be bundled with Visita SP1 and XP SP3. But for a tease, they are planning on releasing a preview version of the fix around December 2007.
My thoughts? About damn time to reverse this. But such a minor change, does it really need to be bundled with a service pack? Can’t it just be bundle into the weekly security update? Oh well, at least they realized it and is getting it fixed. 
