Flash object fix (the gray border). Click here to activate and use this control

About this issue

After a recent IE/Windows update the flash content and other objects (Windows Media, Real Player, Quick Time) cannot be displayed correctly and appear with a gray border and a text “click here to activate and use this control“.

There are few solutions released by different developers, the solution provided by Adobe/Macromedia.com is to add JavaScript in addition to the flash object tag that you already use now.

The article at Adobe web site:
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/activecontent/articles/devletter.html

The JavaScripts at Adobe web site:
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/developer/activecontent_samples.zip

Note: the solution in the above 2 links is the first solution provided by Adobe/Macromedia might be different than the one you find in the sample files below.

Sample files

You will find a flash file there that uses the java scripts provided by Adobe and the gray box will not appear in your updated browsers.

Default code that displays a flash file looks like this:

The new html code should look like this:

Important notes:

The highlighted text is the code that was added to the default code.

Make sure you have same menu width and height in all locations (underlined with red) in all your html code and in the JavaScript that was added in top of default code.

Make sure you have correct ‘movie’ and ’src’ parameters set in the JavaScript.

Movie and Src parameters are entered without the .swf extension.
Download the sample files from here: flash_object_fix_sample.zip.

You will find a flash file there that uses the java script provided by Adobe and the gray box will not appear in your updated browsers.

Using this method should work fine in both IE and Mozilla browsers.

Sample files