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Disabling Flash in the Browser?
fishdan asks: "I know there are a few tools for selectively disabling flash in IE, but there is currently nothing in Mozilla. I'm wondering how many people have just removed Flash (as I have) by deleting the appropriate files? I find it greatly enhances my web experience, and on the very few cases when i think there is something worth seeing in Flash, I'll check it out on someone else's computer. I know someone is working on a 'disable flash from this site' for Moz X.x.x, but I'm wondering what people are doing now? I'm also actively advising people I know to remove Flash because of the lack of control for it on the users end. Short of deleting Flash, there's nothing uses can do to to stop those irritating ads. I don't mind the moderate ones, but the excessive ads are enough for me to throw the baby out with the bath-water."
Funny, that's what Macromedia told me to get me to INSTALL flash!
To answer your question: yes I deleted flash. When I need to see something done in flash, I load up MSIE. (Hell, it's already loaded in memory anyway, might as well use it for something.)
I am of the opinion that the annoying flash ads are going to be what eventually "does-in" Flash. As soon as Mozilla makes it easy to deal with it -- and it will if people want that -- then say goodbye to our annoying, animated friend.
"And like that
He's asking for a more balanced, flexible solution than a big boolean "Install Flash (yes/no)".
Two big problems with your "just don't install it advice"
0. If Flash isn't installed, then every time mozilla opens a page with embedded SWF files you get a dialog box "Click here to install the plugin". A painful interference, one that can happen several times per page if they are heavy on the Flash banner + Flash navbar + Flash mouseover miniad.
1. Most Flash is for ads, but some sites present their actual content in Flash (web-cartoons), and many more work it into the intro-page or navigational frame so that Flash becomes a barrier to reaching the content. In both those cases, you'd desire a toggle-switch to quickly enable/disable Flash depending on whether you need to see it at the moment.
(The zap-embeds bookmarklet trick is good, but not quite optimal)
Flash won't let me middle mouseclick / control mouseclick to open up the appropriate link in another tab.
Some of us are STILL on modem, since we're over 17500 distance from a CO, and the only available broadband is iDSL at over $100 / month.
It's pathetic when ads are the majority of the bandwidth from a webpage. Websites like ESPN and CNN have become quite simply obnoxious. Some flash is good, "AdFlash" is just annoying.