Someone recently asked about the great new "feature" IE has added with it's information bar. Essentially, they are developing with Dreamweaver and adding Flash buttons. However, every time they view the page in IE, the annoying browser security information box pops up, stating that IE is blocking potentially unsafe content which they needed to click on to view the page. Using Firefox as my default browser, I hadn't really run into this problem, but decided to do a little more investigation.

After some Google searching, you can manually override this feature in your computer security settings for your development. In IE, click on Tools | Internet Options and click on the Advanced Tab, and scroll down to your Security settings. If you check the box "Allow active content to run in files on My Computer," when you run content from your local machine in IE, it will bypass the security check.

You should be forewarened that this allows all active content (including perhaps some malicious code) to run on your computer. So, as a disclaimer, make sure you're running up-to-date virus protection software!

There is also a registry hack to accomplish the same thing. OK, before I put a registry hack up, I need to include this: WARNING Don't mess with your registry unless you know what you're doing and make a backup of everything! It's a good idea to create a system restore point in case something goes wrong.

OK, now the hack...In HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_LOCALMACHINE_LOCKDOWN, create a new REG_DWORD name iexplore.exe and set its value to 0 (0 allows web pages to run active content on your computer; 1 disallows it).

After running this, you shouldn't have problems working with Flash in IE. Alternatively, you can use a better browser (like Firefox or Mozilla).