IE Automatic Component Activation

Tuesday, November 13, 2007 5:00 AM

Back in April 2006, Microsoft made a change in how IE handled embedded controls used on some web pages.  These changes resulted in some sites requiring 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.  This change does not require any modifications to existing web pages, and no new actions for developers creating new pages.  It's just a reversion to the old behavior.  Once IE is updates, all pages that currently require "Click to Activate" will just work - they will no longer require the control to be activated.

	Prior to April 2006	After April 2006 (IE ActiveX Update)	After April 2008
Controls injected via Javascript	No "Click to Activate"	No "Click to Activate"	No "Click to Activate"
Controls loaded via HTML using the <object>, <embed> or <applet> tags	No "Click to Activate"	"Click to Activate" required	No "Click to Activate"

So - when is all of this taking place?  There will be an optional preview release, called the Internet Explorer Automatic Component Activation Preview which will be available via the Microsoft Download Center in December 2007.  This change will also be included with the next pre-release versions of Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3.  The behavior will also be rolled into the IE Cumulative Update in April 2008.

All of the info above is from the Internet Explorer blog, so stay tuned for any changes.  Until next time ...