Yet another bug from the world’s most obnoxious browser. This is old news apparently, but since I don’t use I.E. on a PC very often and because I never thought I would have to test Flash on different browsers, I never noticed it.
Anyway, on the newer versions of I.E., when you mouse over a flash object it displays “Click to activate and use this control”. This basically means that all user interaction with the flash file is disabled until they click on it. Not the end of the world, but very annoying. Apparently this is because Microsoft lost a legal battle with a patent holder about the way Internet Explorer displays OBJECTs and EMBEDs in webpages.
I noticed a while ago that people had started to embed their swf’s with Java Script instead of using the Object tag. I never really understood why until now. I found a few ways to fix this little problem, both using JavaScript.