Active Content Restricted Error in Internet Explorer

Now this is an error that rattled my brain for a few days. Here’s the issue: when you are working on website and you are testing locally, you may find that when you try to view the site with Internet Explorer you get the error:

To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has restricted this file from showing active content that could access your computer. Click here for options…”

Then you click and it gives you the option to "allow blocked content".

When I first came across this error, I was trying out some new jquery and spry menus on my pages. Everything was fine in firefox and opera, but IE kept giving this error. I was about to give up, assuming that this was an incompatibility issue with IE and my javascript, and that I’d need to find another way to do what I was looking to do.

That is, of course, until I realized that this is a local error only. So while you are testing locally it’s ok to click on the “click to allow content” while you are testing, and you can rest assured that the error will NOT reappear when you upload the website to the internet.

That’s not to say that certain types of content (sometimes poorly written code) won’t legitimately cause this error, but at a first glance, getting this error doesn’t necessarily mean that your code is incompatible with IE. So allow the site to proceed locally, but if you have any doubts, be sure you do test the page in an online IE environment before you build your site around it. But for most normal content, this problem remains a local error only and will not affect your site once it’s online.

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