Click to Activate and use this Control

In April 2006, Microsoft were forced to make a change on how Internet Explorer and Firefox handled embedded controls used on some web pages. Most sites required users to “click to activate” before they could interact with the control.  In November 2007, Microsoft licensed the technologies from Eolas, removing  the “click to activate” requirement in Internet Explorer. Because of this, Microsoft were able to remove the “click to activate” behavior from Internet Explorer!

It was decided that this process would take place during April 2008 during one of its weekly Hotfix’s.  See the Microsoft IEBlog page for further technical discussion.  So for two years whenever anyone wanted to view a Flash presentation or a YouTube Video, you always had to click twice, once to obtain focus to the control, and once to actually open it.  For 23 months of that time, I like the other billion users simply got used to it, but I became a little bitter in the last few weeks, then all of a sudden it’s not there anymore.  Yeah Bliss… We now only need to single click to open a video.  And all because one company Eolas licenced technology which meant we needed to do this goddamn useless double-click.  That’s right inconvenience 80% of the Internet community (a billion people) simply to honour a company patent.  Normally Microsoft would have just purchased the company.  The story covered here highlights the problem quite succinctly.  This could well be the most ridiculous fiasco that has occurred with Microsoft on the Internet.  It’s enough to make anyone…SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEM!!!