September 15, 2006

Looking for a plugin for IE and Firefox to stop Flash content

I don't ask for help much but I've had it with Flash content on news sites and need advice. I am dead sick of flash content all over sites that I use to gather information. It doesn't matter where you go now, every site has it. The annoying and invasive Flash animations, video, self clicking and good experience killing content.

For example, I use Yahoo! for most of my news viewing and they are constantly using flash to put something new up like new movies, cars, commercials for TV shows, products, iPod stuff etc.

Each and every one of these plays on it's own. You have to click it to stop it and that sucks in itself because sometimes if you roll over them they show up on a layer above the text and take up half the screen.

To top it all off, some of them send information back to the mothership if they have made it so far into whatever video it is, and every time they do this they "click", as if you pressed a link. This is invasive and annoying because if you go to an article and then press the back button to go back to the list you don't go back to where you were, you go back to the top of the list.. I don't think I am explaining it well.. but that's how it is.

All I can say is that I want to block Flash content when I choose to. How do I do that? There must be a plugin somewhere that does this with a click of a button.

Any direction would be appreciated. Looking to kill flash content in IE and Firefox for the time being on a windows machine.

Posted by Graeme at September 15, 2006 05:56 PM
　



Comments

I had installed FlashBlock to Firefox a couple of years ago, to explore the user experience, and haven't removed it yet... everything starts off with a Flash icon which you click to start to play.
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

(Some of the other ad-blockers are based on pixel dimensions or domains and have had problems -- I haven't seen any complications when using FlashBlock.)

If you're using Safari then there's an extension called Pith Helmet, but I haven't tested this. For Opera, I'm not sure. (I assume you're not using Microsoft's browser, for any of various reasons.)

jd

Posted by: John Dowdell at September 16, 2006 04:55 AM

By the way, I've been getting sick recently of the sheer *number* of third-party calls many popular sites make... call out to a half-dozen GIF-based animators, add a blogroll, an Amazon tipjar and some Google ads, and the pages take forever and forever to load... and then there's the need for "skip intro" on text, don't get me started on that.... ;-)

jd

Posted by: John Dowdell at September 16, 2006 04:57 AM

woohoo! I love it, no more annoying flash crap! and that's coming from a guy who does nothing but work with flash...

Thanks John :)

Now I just need the one for Internet Explorer.

Posted by: Graeme at September 16, 2006 07:28 AM