If you’ve used Internet Explorer in the past ~1.5 years, you’ve no doubt been inconvenienced by the fact that you have to click on Flash animations/Java applets/etc. to get them to work. Well, no more. Great news from the Internet Explorer team today:

Back in April 2006, we made a change to how Internet Explorer handled embedded controls used on some webpages. Some sites required users to “click to activate” before they could interact with the control. Microsoft has now licensed the technologies from Eolas, removing the “click to activate” requirement in Internet Explorer. Because of this, we’re removing the “click to activate” behavior from Internet Explorer!

This isn’t an earth-shattering announcement by any means, but I’m still very happy about it. Just one less annoyance I have to put up with in my daily life.

The only downside? You likely won’t get this update until April 2008 or beyond.