Today is ActiveX Black Tuesday

Today Microsoft will release their ‘Active Content’ patch for Internet Explorer 6. From a recent blog post on the MS Security Response Center:

The second issue is that we have a number of security vulnerabilities in IE that are scheduled to be addressed in our next release of security bulletins on Tuesday April 11, 2006. As you know, in order to reduce the complexity of updates and to improve quality, we ship all IE updates as cumulative updates. As a result, the April security updates will include the non-security ActiveX change to respond to the Eolas case.

If you’ve been following this at all since back in December, you’ll already know that you can use FlashObject to get around these changes and your users won’t need to ‘activate’ anything. But for those of you who are new to this issue, you can read an old blog post of mine that covers all the details and links out to all the important sites you might need to check out. It also covers a small bug in the update that I’m hoping has been fixed in this latest release (the script debugging issue).

Hope everyone enjoys the update!

14 thoughts on “Today is ActiveX Black Tuesday

  1. Pingback: /// CityOfRain ///

  2. It appears as though FlashObject is not getting around the ActiveContent issue. Neither is a straight document.write of the tags. Anyone else seeing this?

  3. I am trying to launch swf movies created with captivate.
    I can not get the movie to launch using your object. Is there any problems with
    swf movies created with captivate?

  4. It should work fine, but you’ll have to add in all the extra captivate vars that are passed in via FlashVars.

  5. Hi- we deployed your Eolas workaround, and it works fine, except that a small % of users (probably < 1%)say that they see the alternative content, not flash. They claim to be on XP using IE6. Have you encountered this problem? Another, unrelated question: What is a disadvantage of using the embed tag without object ? It seems that all contemporary browsers implement embed.

  6. Hi, i’ve been fiddling with FlashObject for a couple of days, it works perfectly with IE6 (both patched and unpatched) but it looks like i’m unable to have it working with IE7, the flash simply doesn’t show up, and the browser doesn’t give any kind of error message.

    Any idea?
    Thanks!
    Marcello

  7. Hi – I have a question regarding what I consider an excellent piece of code,
    my issue is with passing variables using FlashVars all is OK in Firefox however
    the problem arives in IE, its fine when i first load my page, i can see things fine
    until I refresh then the object i am calling to display in the movie disappears,
    the swf is still there but no content, when i remove the call for the content the
    movie appears. Very odd, also works fine in safari, is IE blocking the call for the
    content?

  8. this occurs under the SWFObjects code implementation as
    I am trying to get round the “click here to activate
    and use this control” issue introduced by the latest IE
    update, but it seems to only happpen under IE, I have
    tried many variations with different results but still
    IE behaves in a totally strange way, firstly loading the
    content, then making it disappear on refresh, I will post
    this thread under the SWFObject mailing list as suggested
    hoping someone somewhere has a valid answer.

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