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Anything that plays audio without the explicit consent of the user is incredibly impolite.

So are you claiming that video description pages on sites such as YouTube must not autoplay their videos?

Yes, I think that would be an improvement.

By setting the browser to enable plug-ins on demand, unwanted flash ads appear as clickable boxes, and and flash object in a page can be loaded by clicking it.

On the Mac, the ClickToFlash program makes Safari do this, and I love it. Almost as effective and less work than NoScript.

Pro-tip: if your web browser is acting weird (not registering clicks etc..), tip your phone into landscape mode and then back again. You'd be surprised how reliably that fixes weird flash and html problems.

That reminds me of some Windows graphics programs which have "refresh", "redraw", or "repaint" menu items. This always seemed like a cop-out; graphics programs should be very good about keeping the displayed image accurate.

That's why I'm gonna go install ClickToFlash so I don't have it running when I don't want it to.

So Apple joins Microsoft in not shipping Flash pre-installed with their OS, and this proves that Apple has a "vendetta" against Flash?

There have been a lot of patches to fix security problems in Flash of late. Flash doesn't instantly auto-update, so if Apple ships a version with a security hole, there is a window of time during which a user's computer is vulnerable.

Besides, if you go to a Flash-enabled site without Flash, you are immediately prompted to download Flash, so preinstalling Flash is at most a very minor convenience.

If Apple really wanted to wage ware against Flash, they could ship Safari with something like ClickToFlash preinstalled.

ClickToFlash appears to be Free Software. The source is available on github, but I couldn't find a license. Been using it for 6+ month now without problems.

This comes the same day that users report the new MacBook Air doesn't have Flash preinstalled; and while you can install it yourself, Safari doesn't prompt you to do so (just displays a generic "missing plugin" over Flash content and ads).

Is that different from "normal" Macs up to now?

Yes. Up until now, Mac OS X, as shipped pre-installed on Macs, had the Flash plugin bundled with it.

(This probably has nothing to do with the MacBook Air itself; that just happened to be the first machine that came out after the policy changed. Heck, the policy change got me to finally install the latest Flash from Adobe, rather than wait to see if it showed up in a Software Update - not that Flash runs a lot on my machine, given that I've also installed ClickToFlash. Made an big difference in the CPU time consumed on a nominally-idle machine - but then so did not keeping 60+ Safari windows open.)

I use GlimmerBlocker, which is a pretty cool little system extension which has a bunch of built in blocking scripts, but also allows you to create your own.

I also use ClickToFlash, but not sure if that does anything to protect you against Flash Cookies.

Then if you really get annoyed at certain sites, you can always edit your host file.

What is this "flash" you speak of? Do you not have this installed: http://clicktoflash.com/

(OK, obviously even with this, you can purposely load/whitelist specific Flash items..)

If you're using Safari on a Mac, install ClickToFlash, which in addition to letting you leave Flash off until you absolutely need it, shows YouTube video with an H.264 wrapper.

/etc/hosts FTW

A custom /etc/hosts file is not the ultimate solution for all of your ad-blocking needs, but it's DAMN handy and, contrary to what some people will tell you, it does NOT hurt the system in any way. I had a large custom /etc/hosts file on an old machine--a single-core 800 MHz G3 iBook--and the only performance difference I noticed was the gigantic INCREASE in speed when browsing. I had Apache running with a custom 404 that said "Another blocked ad!" and even though you only see it for iframe ads, I still saw it a LOT. Bonus: /etc/hosts works on all installed browsers with no configuration needed, so even a naked install of Chrome, Opera, IE, whatever, is pretty nice even before you configure all the browser-specific adblockers.

Security in layers, man. But even all by itself, /etc/hosts kicks all kinds of ass. Even when I use Safari with no other ad blocking software, the Web is a pretty pleasant place. (Especially if you also add ClickToFlash.)

ClickToFlash http://clicktoflash.com/ is a godsend. Earlier on in this whole Flash debate broke loose someone mentioned it and I've installed it on all OS X systems I use. Some of those are quite old and slow but disabling Flash using ClickToFlash makes web browsing a whole lot quicker on those machines.

ClickToFlash presents the user with a grey square with the word Flash whenever Flash is encountered on a website. The user has the choice to load the Flash content when clicking on the square. Sites can be whitelisted. And as an extra the source url of the Flash content are shown when hovering over it so it's quite easy to distinguish adds.

That's funny, because I have ClickToFlash (http://clicktoflash.com/) installed on Safari on the desktop, and rarely use Flash at all. (I have a very few sites white-listed, and can't remember the last time I clicked on a Flash box on another site to load it.)

I think the browser on the phone is definitely fully functional.