No More “Click to Activate” In The Next Internet Explorer

According to the senior product manager Pete LePage’s post on the Internet Explorer team’s blog, it seems that the next update of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer won’t bug us anymore with the irritating “Click to Activate” warning.


Starting April 2008, when the update is set to launch, the browser won’t feature the warning anymore thanks to what appears to be a side benefit of the August settlement between Microsoft and Eolas Technologies Inc.

The “Click to Activate” notice first appeared in Microsoft’s Internet browser in April 2006, when the company started requiring the users to approve ActiveX controls the first time they were run from the browser. The warning is popping up on the screens when the users select multimedia content, such as clicking on a link to a PDF document or a Flash file.

But it seems that the annoying warning won’t appear anymore starting with the next Internet Explorer update. The settlement that Microsoft reached with Eolas Technologies in August followed a $521 million judgment from 2003 that had come against Microsoft in a patent infringement dispute between the companies. In summer, however, Microsoft licensed Eolas’ technologies and this in turn means that the Internet Explorer browser could ditch the “Click to Activate” warning.

Pete LePage’s post also said that the Internet Explorer Automatic Component Activation Preview would appear in the Microsoft Download Center in December, but the final changes would be pushed to all the Internet Explorer 7 users in April 2008. They will come as part of that month’s scheduled update.