March 24th, 2004

Flash — Click to View

I’ve never been much a fan of Flash. These days in particular, it seems to be mostly used for ads on the web. But, there are occasional uses for it (mushroom mushroom comes to mind).

Now you can have your Flash and eat it too. As a spin-off from bug 94035 (“Allow blocking of any media type”), Jesse Ruderman wrote some code to cover Flash elements with a “Click to Play” box. And, from there Ted Mielczarek packaged that into a handy XPI browser extension for Mozilla & Firefox.

Once installed, each Flash element in a page will be covered with an unobtrusive gray box labeled “Click to Play”. If you want to view that Flash, just click the box. I’ve found that this browser extension makes Flash much more palatable since I only view the Flash elements that I want to see. And, because it installs to your profile directory, you don't have to reinstall it each time you upgrade Mozilla.

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

2 Responses to “Flash — Click to View”

  1. Charles says:

    Thanks for the tip! I HATE Flash. I’ll only visit a Flash site if it has something truly cool, like some Film and band sites. If a company’s site doesn’t offer a choice between Flash and plain HTML, I’m not going to be visiting that company’s site.

  2. SixDifferentWays says:

    Flash Resume

    I don’t much like Flash. 90% of the time it’s used for ads or, some UI a designer thinks…

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